‘Was the Canon to dine wi Bishop Brown?’ Gil asked casually.
‘No, no, never wi the Bishop.’ Benet pulled a face. ‘That Bishop’s ower nice to be dining wi a man that keeps a mistress, no like our Bishop at Dunblane. But to tell truth,’ he slid an embarrassed glance sideways at Gil, ‘I tellt them he would. To raise him up a wee bit, you see,’ he said earnestly, ‘for they were no best pleased wi him about his staying, and who he had wi him, and all.’
Gil nodded slowly. Parts of this fitted well; parts of it did not.
‘What can you recall about Mitchel?’ he asked. ‘Tell me what you spoke of.’
‘Why d’you want to know that?’ asked Benet warily. ‘I’d no want to get the fellow into trouble, I’ve nothing against him.’
‘No, no,’ said Gil reassuringly. ‘I’d hoped he might ha said something about Maister Stirling. Anything that would tell me what the man was doing and why he was killed. Did he mention him at all?’
‘Oh, aye, he did,’ agreed Benet, obviously turning this over in his mind. ‘Though it was only to tell me he wasny his right maister, that he mostly attended on the Bishop’s steward, that seems to be a right good maister and free wi money.’
‘He said that, did he?’
‘Aye, so I tellt him a thing or two about attending on a priest, and we’d a good laugh about some of the cantrips I’ve seen about my maister’s employ.’ Benet recalled who he was speaking to and added quickly, ‘Not at my maister, you understand, sir.’
‘Of course not.’ Gil prodded a clump of box with his foot, and Socrates leaned down to snuffle into the rustling leaves. ‘And Maister Stirling was less generous, was he?’
‘Oh, he never said that. Just that the steward was mighty free. And this man Stirling was heedful o poor folk, he said, look the way he’d sent us to sit in the shade while they talked.’
‘What were they talking about, for so long?’
‘Beats me,’ said Benet. ‘I never got more than a snatch of it. When they left us under the hazel-bush they were talking about my maister’s brother, had he heard from him, I suppose meaning this brother that’s returned from Elfhame. Are we to see him, do you suppose, sir? Is that right he’s shut up in the kirk across yonder?’ He pointed across the loch at the Kirkton, its smoke rising quietly in the sunshine.
‘He’s asked for sanctuary in the kirk,’ said Gil. ‘Of course your maister said he’d not heard, I suppose.’
‘Aye, that’s the truth,’ agreed Benet. ‘And I heard him mention his family. But I’ve no notion after that, save that they were both of them weeping at one stage.’
‘Weeping?’ Gil repeated in astonishment. ‘Sweet St Giles, whatever caused that?’
‘I’ve no notion,’ repeated the man. ‘Mitchel saw it too. The Canon’s done his share o weeping since Mistress Nan dee’d, poor lady, Our Lady bring her to Paradise, but why the other fellow — and Mitchel said he’d no idea neither.’
Gil looked out at the hills around him, without seeing them. What lay between the two men to prompt such a long, intense discussion, tears and talk of forgiveness? Andrew Drummond had taken benefit of clergy; it would not be easy to find out from him, and Stirling was not telling.
‘Did they part on good terms?’ he asked.
‘Oh, aye, the best,’ agreed Benet. ‘They embraced like brothers, so they did, and my maister showed me a siller badge the other fellow had gied him, and tellt me the tale of it and bade me stitch it to his hat first chance I had.’
‘A badge! What like was it?’ Gil demanded.
‘Oh, right strange. A lassie, a saint I suppose wi a sword, but it’s never St Catherine. It’s some strange tale about a princess out of Ireland, but her shrine’s in the Low Countries. Seems this fellow Stirling had been there.’
Gil stared at the man. That was the hat Andrew Drummond had been wearing the first time he saw him, he realized. With the missing badge stitched to its brim.
‘It’s a right shame the man being murdered,’ said Benet, looking uneasy. ‘I wish I’d a known afore we went to Dunkeld — ’
‘Dunkeld?’
‘Aye, that was what I was saying, sir, after you called on him my maister rose up and came out of his melancholy, and set out for Dunkeld that same day to speak wi the Precentor there, that he was at the sang-schule wi, and parted wi him next day on the like terms, all tears and embracing on the doorsill. And if I’d a known of Maister Stirling’s being dead,’ persisted Benet, ‘I’d a tellt Mitchel when I saw him in Dunkeld.’
By the time supper was over and they had retired to their chamber and dismissed Seonaid the day seemed to have been very long already, but neither Gil nor Alys was sleepy. Sitting on embroidered cushions, he sipped Rhenish wine from the dole-cupboard and watched her comb down her hair by the window while he described the interview with Andrew Drummond’s servant.
‘They talked about David,’ she summarized thoughtfully, the honey-coloured locks slipping through her fingers. ‘And about forgiveness, and Judas. They wept, both of them. Stirling gave Andrew the badge off his hat, and they parted on good terms, or so it seems.’
‘The woman Ross said Andrew was elevated when she saw him. It must have been something important they had out between them.’
She nodded at that, and went on plying the comb, moving her arms cautiously as if she was stiff, and gazing out at the summer twilight gathering blue over loch and hills.
‘Then that evening Stirling was shot with a crossbow and put in the tanpit. I wonder if it was a consequence of that? Who else might have put him there?’
‘More than one might have reason to, I’d have said,’ said Gil.
‘Andrew Drummond,’ said Alys. ‘The old priest. The man Mitchel. The tanner, do you think?’
‘We have to include him,’ Gil agreed, ‘though I think it unlikely.’
‘Can you think of anyone else?’
‘Mistress Doig, I suppose, though I don’t know that she could use a crossbow. It was a neat shot, right in the lethal spot at the base of the skull.’
She shivered, and crossed the room to put her comb back in its case.
‘So any of those four could have killed the man, but when? How? How did they have the chance? You told me the tanyard is in the midst of the suburb, surely there must have been people about!’
‘Nobody had come forward before I left Perth to say they had seen anything.’ Gil poured wine for her, and drew her down beside him. ‘One thing about a crossbow, it means the murderer need not have been close to Stirling when he struck.’
‘Yes, but he still had to dispose of the body.’ She sipped at her wine. ‘But why, whoever it was — what reason? And why the tanpit?’
‘It must have been convenient. Presumably he couldn’t be left wherever he was killed, and the tanpit presented a way of concealing his death, for a while at least.’
‘How long?’ she wondered. ‘If the tanner’s man had not found that badge, and so chanced to see the bubbles rising in the pit, how long before they found Stirling?’
‘Long enough for him to be unrecognizable, I would think,’ said Gil. ‘He was well on his way already. The — the skin is well preserved, but the flesh within has gone, and the weight of the skins and planks over him has — ’ She grimaced, and he left that and went on, ‘Cornton knew his clothes. Once they rotted there would be little to go on, particularly since whoever put him there took his hat away with them.’
‘Whoever put him there,’ she repeated.
‘Whoever it was,’ he agreed.
‘Consider them one by one. Why should Andrew Drummond kill James Stirling? What linked them? I suppose it might have been what they were discussing on the meadow.’
‘David,’ offered Gil. ‘The sang-schule. The past.’
‘To which we have no real access. That would mean David is a part of the tale — so the two matters are linked.’
‘They’re linked by Andrew Drummond anyway.’