* * *
'This small amount of blood is not from a stabbing, Eleanor. The smears both on the rod and the hat suggest that he has been struck a blow on the head and this is bleeding from his scalp.'
John de Wolfe tried to make this sound like good news, not mentioning the possibility that Richard's skull might have been cracked like an egg.
He was standing in the yard behind the house in North Gate Street, with Gwyn busy examining the back gate, which now had two of its half-dozen bars missing. The lady of the house was listening to him tight-lipped, with Matilda hovering anxiously behind her, common adversity driving these two women into an attempt to be friendly and supportive to each other. In fact Matilda, for all her recent antagonism to her brother, seemed the more upset, though Eleanor's usual glacial manner might have concealed more concern than was apparent.
'Did he not return home last night?' Matilda asked anxiously. 'Where can he have been?'
Her sister-in-law was not anxious to answer that last question, as she suspected that she knew what had taken her husband out into the dark streets.
'He was not in his bed at all. This accident must have occurred late last evening, after I had retired.'
She had responded to de Wolfe's routine questions with some reluctance, as she thought him little better than an ill-mannered soldier, but the evidence that Matthew had found had left her with little option but to send a message to Richard's sister, since her husband was a senior law officer — albeit one she blamed for Richard's repeated falls from grace,
'I fear this can be no accident, lady,' said John, as gently as he could. 'No one strikes themselves on the head hard enough to draw blood. And the use of this iron rod makes it impossible to believe that the petpetrator is anyone other than the assassin who killed those other men.'
Eleanor de Revelle drew her thin body stiffly upright and fixed him with her pale blue eyes. 'So you think Richard is dead, John?' she asked tonelessly. Already she was readjusting herself to the role of widow and wondering if it might not be preferable to being married to an inveterate scoundrel.
But de Wolfe was not yet ready to go along with her speculations. Strangely, he admitted to himself, though he had often wished his brother-in-law in hell, under these circumstances he ardently hoped that the man was still alive and not another victim of this murdering bastard. If Richard was to forfeit his life, it should be legally at the end of a rope, not by being slain by some crazed journeyman.
'He may well be alive, Eleanor,' he reassured her.
'This spike, whose partner was used to kill another man, has not been used other than as a club.' He hefted the rod in his hand to assess its weight. 'I think Richard was struck to deprive him of his wits and has been carried off somewhere. Maybe he is being held as a hostage, as we have been seeking this Geoffrey Trove all over the city. At least we know who the villain is that attacked your husband.'
The wife scowled at the coroner. 'And what good is knowing his name, if you cannot find him — or where he has taken my husband?'
Matilda, who cared for her sister-in-law about as much as the Lionheart cared for Philip of France, came to her husband's defence.
'John is doing all he can, Eleanor! This killer has led everyone a merry dance for weeks — as I know to my cost, as he half-killed me in the cathedral Close.' De Wolfe decided to leave his wife to bandy words with Richard's haughty wife and walked across the muddy yard to where Gwyn was peering at the ground near the gate, which led into a short side lane leading out to North Gate Street.
'There's a real mess of footprints around here, Crowner, but nothing of any use, with so many people in and out of here every day.'
John looked down and agreed with his officer. 'If de Revelle was struck on the head, as he surely must have been, where is he now?' he rasped. 'Dead or alive, I doubt he walked out of here.'
Just then Thomas arrived, out of breath after hurrying from his chantry duties at the cathedral, and the coroner briefly explained what had happened.
'He must have been carried away, or possibly dragged,' suggested the clerk. 'Was this Geoffrey a big man, strong enough to do that?'
'I only saw him once, in that guild meeting,' grunted the coroner. 'But he seemed tough enough, which is what you would expect of a blacksmith and ironworker.'
'No drag marks in the mud,' growled Gwyn, looking again at the ground. 'If he was hauled away, you'd expect his heels to leave a couple of grooves in this soft muck.'
De Wolfe opened the gate, which was now minus two of its rails, and went out into the lane. He looked first up to North Gate Street, only a few yards away.
'I can't see Trove struggling through the main streets with a body in his arms, even late at night. Surely he would have gone the other way?'
They turned and looked down the narrow lane, which was no more than a path between the yards of the burgages on either side. Matthew, the steward of the house, was hovering around, looking lost and anxious, and John beckoned him nearer.
'Where does this lane go?' he demanded.
The servant, a middle-aged fellow with a bad turn in his eye, seemed to stare directly at both Gwyn and the coroner simultaneously.
'It goes past burgage plots and vegetable gardens through to St Mary Arches Lane, sir. Beyond that is St Nicholas Priory and the warren of Bretayne.'
De Wolfe cursed under his breath. From there, the whole of the bottom quarter of the city was accessible.
In the squalor of Bretayne, no one would look twice at a man stumbling along at night with a drunken friend — or even a corpse.
'What about a hound, master?' asked Thomas, as usual having the quickest mind amongst them. 'Could not a lymer sniff out a human quarry, if he is given something with his scent upon it?'
A lymer was one of the several types of hunting dog, the breed with the keenest nose, as opposed to the greyhound, which hunted by sight. John looked at Gwyn questioningly, as neither of them had thought of this novel idea.
'We've got the hat he wore last night, with his blood upon it,' said the coroner. 'Do you think it would work?'
'What dog could we use?' asked Gwyn, then his broad face lit up. 'Your Brutus, why not? He was a grand old lymer when he was younger, and there's nothing wrong with his snout even now.
The Cornishman was a great dog-lover, and they seemed to respond to him in a similar fashion. A few moments later, he was hurrying back down North Street and soon he had returned with the long-legged brown hound, taken from the coroner's house under Mary's astonished gaze.
John had explained to the two ladies what they were going to try and when Brutus arrived, he stuffed the foppish hat under the dog's nose, hoping that his old hound would grasp what was required.
The animal seemed delighted at this novel outing, which was a change from his usual walk down to the Bush tavern. When Gwyn called him into the lane and set off through the garden plots, he loped ahead in a determined way, stopping every few yards to sniff the weeds and fence posts on either side.
'He's going somewhere, bless him,' yelled Gwyn, as he hurried to keep up with the dog, with the coroner, his clerk and the steward trotting along behind.
At the end of the path, they came out on to a wider lane which came from Fore Street past St Mary Arches church and wound around the compound of St Nicholas Priory, where the few Benedictine monks kept a large vegetable garden in addition to their devotional tasks.
Brutus sniffed deeply at a bush on the corner, then cocked his leg against it, before ambling off with the diagonal gait that so many long-legged dogs possessed.