‘You are right to be uneasy,’ whispered Wormynghalle. ‘Do not allow yourself to become embroiled in this, Matt. Let Michael do it – this sort of thing is why he is paid such a princely salary.’
‘I want him with me,’ said Michael, overhearing. ‘Where are we going, anyway?’
Paxtone did not reply, but walked into the yard, where he passed a number of buildings before reaching a disused stable block at the far end of the vegetable plots. It was near the river, and Bartholomew was aware of the water’s dank fumes. Paxtone approached a ramshackle shed, and opened a door that creaked rustily. Everyone waited in silence while he took a lamp from a hook on the wall and set about lighting it.
‘What are you doing?’ came an appalled voice from behind them. It was Norton. ‘Are you mad?’
‘We have no choice,’ said Paxtone, busy with the wick.
‘You should have waited,’ shouted Norton furiously. ‘This should be for the Warden and all the Fellows to decide, not just you three. You have no right.’
‘I do not care,’ said Paxtone. ‘I have seen what happens when men try to deceive their way out of difficult situations. They always end up in deeper trouble. It is better this way.’
‘I am not sure I want to remain here any longer,’ said Norton coldly. Bartholomew saw unease and fear under the shell of anger. ‘It is not how I imagined it would be. It is all gossiping in Latin and eating too much. I shall resign at the end of term.’
‘Good,’ said Wormynghalle, as Norton stalked away. ‘At least something good has come out of this. That man has no right to present himself as a scholar. It is an insult to those of us with minds.’
Once the wick burned, Paxtone led the way inside the stable. Bartholomew could make out very little in the gloom, other than that it was dusty and dry.
‘Here is Hamecotes,’ said Paxtone, carrying the lamp to a table that stood in the centre of the room and tugging away a rug to reveal a body. It was swollen and black, and should have been in its grave days before. Michael gasped in shock, and backed away so fast that he collided with Dodenho. Bartholomew simply stared at the sorry sight in front of him.
‘We found him here this morning,’ explained Wormynghalle, putting her hand over her mouth and averting her eyes. Bartholomew saw she was struggling not to betray herself by fainting or being sick. Dodenho was not so iron-willed. He shoved his way past her to reach the fresh air outside, where he stood rubber-legged and breathing heavily.
‘He has been dead a lot longer than that,’ said Michael, stating the obvious. ‘When did you say he left for Oxford?’
‘The morning after Ascension,’ replied Wormynghalle shakily. ‘Fifteen days ago.’
‘And how long has he been a corpse?’ asked Michael, as Bartholomew studied the grisly spectacle.
‘Less than fifteen days, but probably more than five. It is impossible to be precise.’
‘I said farewell to him that morning, and he told me he was looking forward to his journey,’ said Wormynghalle, fighting back tears. She turned away abruptly, and hurried to stand outside with Dodenho, staring up at the sky and blinking hard as she fought to regain control of herself.
Paxtone went to put a paternal arm around her shoulders, and Bartholomew saw her struggle not to recoil from his touch. ‘I know this is hard,’ Paxtone said kindly. ‘You were friends as well as room-mates, and he thought very highly of your scholarship.’
Wormynghalle gulped and tears began to flow freely. ‘He said that?’
Paxtone nodded. ‘Many times. He said you were the cleverest man in the College, and boasted that he was the room-mate of the Fellow destined for widespread academic acclaim.’
Wormynghalle turned away in a flood of grief, while Dodenho straightened himself carefully. ‘Surely you are mistaken,’ he said. ‘He must have meant me.’
‘Never mind that,’ said Michael. ‘If Hamecotes died between the time he left for Oxford and five days ago, does it mean he fulfilled his book-buying duties and came back? Or did he not go at all – in which case who wrote the letters purporting to be from him?’
‘They were in his writing,’ said Wormynghalle in a muffled voice. She took a deep breath and entered the shed again, Paxtone and Dodenho following. ‘You can see them, if you like. I retained them because I intended to scrape the parchment and reuse it later. Perhaps I will keep them now, to remind me of his friendship.’
‘I wonder if he wrote them before he left, as a ruse,’ mused Michael. ‘That would have given him a few free days to go about his business – whatever that was. Was he with Wolf, do you think, looking after him at Stourbridge?’
‘Possibly,’ replied Paxtone. ‘But Wolf was reasonably fit when I saw him a few days before he went missing himself – he had a summer chill, but we all suffer those from time to time. He stayed a day or two at the hospital, but he was malingering, medically speaking.’
‘No sign of the pox, then?’ asked Michael bluntly.
Paxtone did not like his supposedly celibate colleagues being accused of contracting sexually transmitted diseases. ‘No,’ he said shortly.
Michael turned back to the body, forcing himself to look at it. ‘So, how did Hamecotes come to be in this building? Who found him?’
‘I did,’ said Dodenho hoarsely. ‘I like to practise my lectures here, because it is more private than my room. I came on Tuesday evening – he was not here then – and I found his body today. Therefore, he must have brought himself here during the last two and a half days.’
‘He did not come under his own power,’ said Bartholomew. ‘He has been dead too long.’
‘I told you that,’ said Paxtone to Dodenho, rather pompously for someone who knew so little about the dead. ‘He was put here: he did not walk to this building on his own.’
‘But who would do such a thing?’ asked Wormynghalle in a small voice. ‘And how did he die? Did he drown? I see from his clothes that he has been wet, and I know he cannot swim.’
‘He may have been in the river,’ said Bartholomew. ‘But that is not what killed him. This is.’ He eased away Hamecotes’s liripipe to reveal a slashing gape across the throat, ragged and uneven, as if some blunt, crude implement had been used to inflict the damage.
Dodenho shot from the room, pushing past Wormynghalle and almost knocking her off her feet. Paxtone reeled back with his hand to his mouth, while Michael inhaled sharply at the sight.
‘And that is not all,’ said Bartholomew softly. ‘This is the man whose body was in the cistern in Merton Hall.’
Michael gazed at Bartholomew in the darkness of the dilapidated stables. The physician could hear Dodenho retching outside, while Wormynghalle and Paxtone stood well back, so they were not obliged to see the horror on the table. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. I recognise the shape of his nose and the moss-coloured liripipe.’
‘He often wore that,’ said Wormynghalle in a cracked voice. ‘He liked green clothes.’
‘You told me that when I wrote Dodenho’s prescription, and you gave me his emerald ink to use by mistake,’ recalled Bartholomew. ‘I should have put the facts together sooner, because I remember this garment quite clearly from the well.’
‘But how did he come to be here?’ demanded Michael.
No one could answer, and Bartholomew went back to his examination. He quickly established for certain that the throat wound was the cause of death, and ascertained from the state of the body that it had been immersed in water for some time. There was only one other thing that was pertinent: a rope around the corpse’s feet, which had been cut. He supposed it had been attached to stones and used to weight Hamecotes down, to prevent him from floating. It explained why the body had been so heavy when he had pulled it to the surface in the belief that it was Michael. He realised it would have remained hidden indefinitely, had Michael not had the misfortune to fall in with it. He told the others his conclusions.