‘Hell’s teeth!’ I swore before I could stop myself. (John Carpenter was a very pious man. I always suspected him of having Lollard sympathies.) ‘Didn’t anyone hear anything? The lawyer himself or one of the servants? Not his mother, of course. Dame Heathersett’s too old and deaf.’
The carpenter said excitedly, ‘Oh dear me, yes! It appears the lawyer himself went to investigate and got laid out for his pains. Knocked over the head, he was. His man, Godfrey, found him in his consulting room, trussed up like a Christmas chicken, when he got up this morning. One of the ground-floor shutters had been removed.’
‘Was much stolen?’
The carpenter shook his head. ‘That I can’t tell you. The servant who came to fetch me didn’t have any details, except that Sergeant Manifold and his assistants were all there and also that the physician had been sent for. The lawyer ain’t dead, far from it, but it couldn’t have been a pleasant experience for a man of his years.’ He added, preparing to move, ‘I’ll come to your house when I’ve finished at his. After dinner, most likely.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ I said. ‘I’d better report my own affair to the sergeant. There may be some connection.’
My companion nodded. ‘Aye, there might be at that. Some gang working the streets. Or maybe just one man. Thwarted at your house, he probably went off to find another, easier mark to rob.’
I wasn’t convinced of this. And yet it seemed the obvious explanation.
The lawyer’s premises in Runnymede Court were unusually full of people. As well as the physician, who was busy bathing a nasty gash on the top of Geoffrey Heathersett’s head with comfrey juice, Richard Manifold, Peter Littleman and Jack Gload were also taking up a great deal of space, while old Dame Heathersett hovered, twittering, in the background. She was a small, bird-like woman with grey hair and washed-out blue eyes, at least seventy years of age by her reckoning (she always maintained that she had been born two years before the battle of Agincourt), widow of a lawyer’s clerk and inordinately proud of her only son, who had risen higher than his father to become a fully fledged attorney.
‘What are you doing here, Roger?’ was Richard’s bad-tempered greeting as soon as he clapped eyes on me, but he changed his tune when I had told my tale. ‘Bugger!’ he exclaimed, scandalizing not just old Clorinda Heathersett, but John Carpenter as well. ‘There must be a gang working these streets. I’ve just this minute received word that Master Foliot’s house was also a target for thieves last night. There was an attempt to break into his house in St Peter’s Street.’
‘St Peter’s Street?’ I grimaced significantly, slightly raising my eyebrows. ‘Are you sure that’s what he said? He didn’t mention anything about St Mary le Port Street and his shop there?’
‘What? Oh! No.’ Richard looked more harassed than ever. ‘Go away now, Roger, will you? I’ll call on you and Adela later, but for the present I wish to question Lawyer Heathersett and his mother, and I shan’t be able to concentrate with you hovering over me, listening to every word.’
I grinned. He had never before come so close to admitting that my presence rattled him. I suspected that he was under some pressure from the City Fathers to catch this thief — or thieves — as soon as possible. It was one thing for people like myself to be robbed and inconvenienced without too much effort being expended to apprehend the culprits, but quite another for important personages such as rich merchants and men of law to suffer the same fate and the perpetrators go unpunished.
‘I’ll leave you then,’ I said and turned on my heel. Then I had a thought and turned back. Ignoring Richard and his furious expression, I approached the lawyer who was shifting around on a stool while the doctor tried to bandage his head.
‘You’re hurting me. You’re a damned, clumsy fool,’ he was upbraiding the poor man. ‘Haven’t I had enough to put up with this night without a leech with ten thumbs, who doesn’t know his business, pulling me about like a sack of turnips?’
‘Then stop wriggling around like an eel on the end of a fishing line,’ snapped the target of all this rancour. ‘A child would make less fuss. It was quite a nasty blow, I grant you, but not one that was meant to kill. You’ll live for several more years yet.’
Before the lawyer could think of a suitable response, I bent down and grasped his arm. ‘Master Heathersett, it’s Roger Chapman. Did you by any chance see the man who struck you?’
The lawyer nodded. ‘He was tall,’ he said eagerly. ‘Mind you, I didn’t see his face. He attacked me from behind. I’d come downstairs to find out what it was had woken me, and as I entered this room, I could see that one shutter was off its hinges. That was when he hit me. But the injury is to the top of my head, which means my assailant was taller than I am. Master Callowhill and I have been complaining for days of our footsteps being dogged by a couple of very tall rogues, but no one would take our complaints seriously.’ He ended on a shrill, accusing note as Richard Manifold jostled me angrily out of his way.
‘If you say one more word, Roger,’ he snarled, ‘if you put one more question to this witness, as sure as God’s in His heaven, I’ll have you clapped up in Bristol gaol.’
‘I’m going,’ I said hastily, straightening up. There were times when it was safe to oppose Richard and others when it was wise to back down. This was definitely one of the latter.
Matters, moreover, were not improved when the lawyer said fretfully, ‘You’d do well to listen to him, Sergeant. Master Chapman has more sense than you and those two dolts’ — jerking his head in the direction of Peter Littleman and Jack Gload — ‘have put together.’
It was definitely time I left. Richard was swelling with indignation, his face crimson with suppressed emotion, while his two henchmen were doing their best to look affronted. So I took my leave and went to the goldsmith’s house in St Peter’s Street, where I was told that he was in the church next door, attending a special service for the Wardens of St Mary Bellhouse, but anyone could attend who wished to do so.
The nave was packed as always with pilgrims come to pay their respects at the shrine, and I was forced to stand right at the back, peering over people’s heads. I could just make out the figure of Gilbert Foliot at one end of the row of six men in their blue silk robes and holding their white staffs of office. The shrine itself was lit by the glow from a dozen or more candles, all of which guttered in a draught, the source of which I was unable to locate. I glanced over my shoulder but the door was fast shut.
A fat woman standing next to me whispered, ‘They always do that. Odd, ain’t it? You a stranger here?’
I had to admit that I wasn’t. I muttered in extenuation that my wife and I usually worshipped at St Giles’s.
When the Mass was finished, I would have moved at once towards the door to lie in wait for my quarry, but the fat woman caught at my arm, wheezing heavily.
‘I’m no good in a crowd these days,’ she apologized. ‘It’s me chest.’ She patted her ample bosom, suddenly becoming loquacious. ‘Got trouble with me breathing. Me daughter’s made me a concoction of coltsfoot and honey, but it don’t seem to be doing no good. They say breathing up smoke from a fire’s another remedy, though I’ve never tried it meself.’
Once outside in the street, I tried to free my arm from her determined grasp, but she was tenacious and I could see that she was spent. I could hardly leave the poor soul to her own devices.
‘Do you have far to go?’ I asked, hoping the answer was ‘no’. The crowd was beginning to disperse and I could see Gilbert Foliot, who had until then been deep in conversation with his fellow wardens, turning towards his door. I edged a few steps in his direction.
‘Me home’s in Keynsham,’ she panted. ‘But I’m stopping a night or two with me sister in St Mary le Port Street. It ain’t far. If you’d just be kind enough — and you looks a kind man — to give me your arm to her door, I’d be that grateful.’