‘Yessir — no, sir! I ran out of here as if Satan himself was after me.’
‘Why were you here at all, so early in the day?’
The man hesitated, not from guilt but shame. ‘I wanted a loan, Crowner. Never before have I needed to borrow, but my business as a fletcher has been so bad with the King’s army away in France for over a year that I needed money to tide me over.’
‘Y ou need a good war to get you back on your feet,’ suggested Gwyn to the arrow-maker, not unsympathetically.
De Wolfe gave one of his throaty grunts, which might have meant anything, and turned his attention back to the dead man. ‘That drawstring around his neck, Gwyn, is it tight enough to strangle him?’
The Cornishman poked a large forefinger between the neck of the money-bag and the collar of the black woollen tunic that shrouded the money-lender. ‘Feels loose enough to me now, though it might have been pulled tight earlier.’
‘But it’s not knotted to hold it in place,’ growled John. ‘Let’s have it off his head.’
His officer pulled the neck of the bag as wide as it would stretch and slid it up over the face and head of the Jew. A full grey beard was revealed first, then a pale face with closed eyes. Long iron-grey hair, parted in the centre, framed strong features with a peaceful expression.
‘Anything in the bag?’
Gwyn peered into the strong leather pouch, which had neat, tight stitching along the seams. He put in a hand and studied his fingertips when he withdrew them. ‘Blood — not much, but it’s fresh.’
The fletcher was still standing inside the door, gaping at the scene, and the Saxon guard peering in through the window, as de Wolfe put a bony hand under the neck of the cadaver and tried to pull it into a sitting position. The whole body moved, resting on its heels, and the coroner let it drop back. ‘Stiff as a bloody board! Must have been dead a good few hours. Pull him over — I want to see the back of his head.’
Gwyn grabbed a shoulder and effortlessly turned the corpse on to its side. He held it there while John felt under the armpits, then prodded at the scalp with his fingers. ‘Matted blood in the hair. Can’t feel any broken bone underneath. There’s still a bit of warmth under the arms, so he must have been killed during the night.’
Gwyn lowered the body back to the floor and they both crouched silently for a moment, staring at the moneylender as if waiting for him to give them some answers.
‘Give me that bag,’ commanded de Wolfe. He turned it over in his hands, pulled at the drawstrings, then tested the strength of the seams. ‘Good enough to be airtight, with the neck of the bag filled with his collar and that mass of beard. Must have cut off his breathing well enough.’
‘He’s not blue in the face, Crowner,’ objected Gwyn.
‘Doesn’t need to be, it’s not like being garrotted. I’ve seen a few smotherings and they weren’t blue.’ John vied with his officer in considering himself to be an authority on all modes of violent death, after twenty years in a dozen campaigns across the known world.
They went through their usual routine of pulling up the dead man’s tunic to examine the rest of his body. As they moved his arms, a scrap of folded parchment fell from his fingers. John opened it, but could make no sense of the crabbed writing upon it. He was learning to read and write but this script defeated him, and everyone else present was even less literate than he was.
The corpse wore long woollen hose held up by strings attached to an underbelt and had a shawl-like garment around his shoulders, over his long tunic. He had the wrinkled skin of an elderly man and the brown moles and blotches of advancing age, but there was no sign of injury, other than the blow to the head. De Wolfe stood up, and looked around the room again. ‘You say he lived in the next chamber?’
The Saxon outside the window nodded. ‘He rents the rooms from Edmund Pace, a cloth merchant who uses the rest of the house as a store for his bales. I think it’s a sub-letting, as the building belongs to the Church.’
‘Let’s have a look next door,’ commanded the coroner, and led the way through the other doorway into the back room. This was as black as pitch, but de Wolfe saw a crack of daylight in the back wall and, stumbling over a dead fire-pit in the centre, reached a small window with a tight-fitting shutter. When he pounded on it with the heel of his hand, it flew open to reveal a narrow alley at the back of the house, which opened twenty paces on into Palace Lane, the next connection between Southgate Street and the cathedral Close.
‘Like a damned rabbit warren, this city,’ grunted Gwyn.
His master was looking at the surround of the window. ‘I doubt any killer came in or out this way,’ he grunted. ‘The shutter was jammed tight and the dirt on the sill hasn’t been disturbed for years.’ He turned to view the room, as mean a chamber as the one where the dead Jew lay. A ring of stones in the centre surrounded a depression lined with clay, filled with ashes. A blackened cooking pot sat at one side and a three-legged stool bore a wooden tray with a dented pewter plate and an earthenware cup. Against one wall was a table, with a loaf of bread, a jug of milk and a few shrivelled apples, alongside a knife and a horn spoon. Two rough shelves hung on the wall above the table, carrying a pot of salt, some dried herbs and a dish of oatmeal.
On the opposite side of the room, the moneylender’s bed consisted of a long hessian bag stuffed with hay, lying on planks supported by four large stones to keep it clear of the damp floor. The only other furniture was a large oak chest, secured by a stout hasp and a padlock.
De Wolfe looked around with distaste mingled with pity. ‘Fancy having to live in hovel like this. He must have come down in the world — he can’t have been making much profit from his usury.’ He bent down and rattled the lock on the chest. ‘Best have a look in here — did he have a key on him?’
Gwyn went back to the other room to search the corpse. When he came back, he was followed by a small, painfully thin figure dressed in a long black threadbare tunic. The new arrival had one hunched shoulder and walked with a slight limp. ‘Look what’s blown in, Crowner — our noble clerk!’
The Cornishman’s sarcasm was laced with affection, for Thomas de Peyne was going through a difficult time. Last month he had attempted to kill himself during a fit of depression over his continued failure to be re-admitted to his beloved Church. Even that had turned into a fiasco, when his clothing caught on a water-spout as he jumped from the cathedral parapet.
De Wolfe nodded curtly at Thomas, then held out a hand for the key Gwyn had found tied to the moneylender’s belt. He used it to open the chest, when he found two bags, similar to the one that had been over Aaron’s head. They were both filled with coin and there was another thick book filled with lines of neat writing: de Wolfe handed it to his highly literate clerk. ‘I presume this is a record of his business, eh?’
Thomas rapidly scanned a few pages. ‘Yes, Crowner. He has names, dates and the amount of the loan, as well as when it was paid back.’ His reedy voice ended in a whistle. ‘A good business to be in, judging by the difference between the loan and the repayment.’ He handed the book back to the coroner, who was peering inside the money bags.
‘Quite a few pounds in here — robbery certainly wasn’t the motive.’
‘Maybe the killer was disturbed before he could find the key?’ countered Gwyn.
‘Then why didn’t he grab the coins from the floor next door? There must be a few shillings’ worth there.’
De Wolfe locked the chest, stood up and slipped the key into the purse hanging from his belt. ‘Let’s have another look next door.’
They trooped back into the front room, where the constable was still stationed outside the window to keep away curious eyes. The fletcher had vanished, and the three members of the coroner’s team stood around the body, staring at it as if urging it to tell them what had happened.
Thomas’s eyes roved around the room, taking in details of the bare chamber. Always insatiably curious, his long thin nose seemed to point like that of a hunting dog, and the squint in his left eye was accentuated as he turned his head slowly back and forth. Though unfrocked from the priesthood several years before, he still affected a tonsure, the shaven patch surrounded by lustreless black hair.