‘Indeed,’ Parry agreed. ‘There has been much rain this spring, as you know, and the stream was full, a good deal of mud around it. Kempsley saw something white sticking out of the stream, and in the early light thought a sheep had got itself trapped. When he came closer, though, he got the shock of his life.’ He paused. ‘I warn you, this next part is, as I said earlier, depraved and revolting. It was no sheep that Kempsley saw but, sticking up from the water, the naked body of Edith Boleyn. She had been shoved into the stream head first, her head and the upper half of her body buried in the water and the mud beneath. Her lower half stuck up in the air, her legs pulled apart so that her private parts were displayed to the heavens.’
There was a moment’s silence. ‘Someone must have hated her very much to do that,’ I said quietly. ‘What was the cause of death?’
‘No question about that,’ Parry answered. ‘She had been struck on the head with something very heavy. Kempsley says the top of her head fell to pieces when they pulled the body out. It must have been placed in the stream the night before. And yet Edith Boleyn had, according to law, already been dead for two years.’
Nicholas had been taking notes, a paper on a wooden board on his knees, but now his quill skittered across the page, dropping blots. ‘What?’
Parry laughed bleakly. ‘That was my reaction when lawyer Copuldyke told me.’ He drew a second deposition from the folder. ‘According to John Boleyn, his wife Edith, mother of his two sons, simply vanished one day in 1540, nine years ago. He says they had never got on, but her disappearance was sudden and unexpected. She vanished one winter day with nothing but the clothes she stood up in. John Boleyn enquired of her family – and she does have family, despite what she told us – her servants and the neighbours, but nobody had seen her or could explain her disappearance. She was never seen again. Two years ago, seven years having passed, Master Boleyn applied to the coroner to have Edith declared legally dead. An order was granted, and last year he married his current wife – with whom he had already been living for some years, somewhat to the scandal of the community.’
I considered. ‘The courts usually investigate such claims thoroughly, where a spouse has disappeared.’
‘They did. The local coroner, apparently, is a man of probity. He found that nobody in the neighbourhood had seen or heard anything of Edith since the day she vanished. During his enquiries the question of her state of mind was raised. Everyone agreed she was a strange, surly woman. According to Boleyn, there were times when she would refuse to eat, and become very thin – she looked starved when she came here, though I thought that was from being penniless on the road.’
‘And nobody had seen her in nine years, until she arrived here?’
‘Nobody. Apparently, John Boleyn had been carrying on with his current wife even before Edith vanished, and some gossiping woman had told Edith not long before she disappeared; John Boleyn’s deposition says that in the period before she left she was full of melancholy and was refusing to eat properly again.’ Parry took a deep breath. ‘The coroner’s view was that Edith had most likely committed suicide, perhaps by drowning herself in a river, the body carried out to sea and never found.’
I said, ‘If John Boleyn had been seeing another woman nine years ago, and his wife discovered it and made trouble, that could have given him a reason to murder her then.’
Parry nodded agreement. ‘So people said back in 1540. But there was no evidence, no body. John Boleyn left it a year before he moved his lover’ – Parry glanced at the depositions – ‘Isabella Heath, into his home, but after that they lived together quite openly. She worked in a tavern, would you believe? The neighbouring gentry were outraged, and there were mutterings that such behaviour was only to be expected of a Boleyn. And always the suspicion that he had done away with his wife. Recently, by the way, there had been serious trouble with his neighbour Witherington over the land dispute, involving some sort of violent affray. And there are rumours he is in financial difficulty – he owns several manors, but recently he bought an expensive London house.’
Nicholas said, ‘So his wife was actually not dead at all, she had only left him?’
Parry spread his hands wide. ‘That is how it appears. She must have been somewhere these last nine years, but God knows where. All we do know is that she was found horribly murdered less than a fortnight after she visited this house.’
‘And your lawyer Copuldyke told you about the murder?’ I asked.
‘He learned of it through his man in Norwich, Lockswood. Copuldyke thought I should know as I had made enquiries about her after she visited Hatfield.’
‘And John Boleyn has been arrested?’
‘Yes. Edith was identified by her father, and John Boleyn arrested the next day.’
‘That is quick,’ Nicholas said.
I said, ‘In a murder investigation, if you don’t find the killer – or a credible suspect – within a few days the trail quickly goes cold.’ I turned to Parry. ‘What were the grounds for his arrest?’
‘Strong ones. There were footprints in the mud around the body, made by large, heavy shoes, well clouted with nails. John Boleyn is a big man and when a search of his house was ordered, a pair of such shoes, covered with mud, were found in the stables, where he keeps a horse so unruly that no one but him dare approach it. Together with a large, heavy hammer, with blood and hair on it.’
Nicholas looked at me. ‘Someone could have put them there, to incriminate Boleyn,’ he said.
Parry produced another document. ‘According to the coroner’s report, apart from a stable boy who was apparently half-witted, Boleyn had the only key to the stables. But he will plead not guilty when he appears before the Norwich Assizes this month. The judges have already started out on their circuit tours.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I heard some of them wanted the summer circuits postponed, because of the disturbances last month, but Lord Chancellor Rich would have none of it. The judges are to travel as usual, and show their power.’
‘Is Barak on circuit?’ Nicholas asked.
‘Yes, and on the Norfolk circuit this time. He did the Home circuit last year.’
‘Who is Barak?’ Parry asked.
‘My former assistant. He is now a jobbing solicitor, and works part-time assisting the judges on the summer and winter circuits near London.’ I considered. ‘The circuit will probably be trying cases in Buckinghamshire now, on their way out to East Anglia.’
Parry said, ‘The Norwich Assizes opens on the eighteenth of June. Less than a fortnight away. Could this Barak be useful?’
I answered carefully. ‘He might be able to help with information. He worked with me for many years, and is quite trustworthy.’
Parry considered. ‘Then I agree that you talk to him about the case. But not about Edith Boleyn’s visit to Hatfield.’
‘Of course.’ I considered. ‘Surely there is a good chance of Boleyn being found innocent. If his vanished wife had turned up at his house again after nine years, and he had remarried, that would give him a motive to kill her, but quietly and secretly. Displaying the body publicly like that, showing she had been alive the day before – that automatically invalidates his new marriage, and opens an investigation where he must be a suspect. Why would any sane man do that?’
Parry shrugged. ‘Perhaps she returned home and he was so overcome with rage and hatred he temporarily lost his reason. But I agree, it sounds more like someone wanting to get Boleyn into trouble. As I said, he is unpopular locally, and I do not need to tell you that counts for much in a jury trial.’