Fortune Like the Moon (7 page)

‘Gunnora was present at midnight?’

‘She was. And absent for Prime, when the alarm was raised and the search parties sent out.’

‘She left, then, in the small hours.’ He closed his eyes, apparently as an aid to visualising the scene. ‘Let us say that, intending this nocturnal expedition, she returned to her recess after the midnight office and made sure she stayed awake. Perhaps lay down fully dressed, so as not to risk making a noise when she rose again. Would anyone have noticed if she did that?’

‘No. We do not peer into each other’s sleeping areas. And, besides, the candles are blown out as soon as we are back in the dormitory.’

‘So. Gunnora waited until everyone was asleep, then moved silently along the dormitory, past all the sleeping sisters, and—’

‘Not all of them. Gunnora’s cubicle was three from the door.’

‘I see. She opened the door, and—’

‘No, it was propped open. It was a very hot night, and we had elected to leave the door open so as to get a little more air into the dormitory.’

‘Ah. Hm.’ Again, the closed eyes. ‘Abbess, might I be permitted to look inside the dormitory?’

She had known he would ask. She replied simply, ‘Yes.’

*   *   *

She guessed what he was going to do. He asked her to arrange the long room – now quite empty – as it had been that night. She did so, propping the door with the same stone and arranging the flimsy hangings around the first few cubicles. The tidiness and immaculate order pleased her; she was glad this wasn’t a day when some sister, in a hurry, had left her bedding even slightly disarrayed. Then she showed him where Gunnora had slept. He stepped inside the adjacent cubicle, and let the thin curtain fall again.

‘Now, if you would be so kind?’ he asked.

She went into Gunnora’s cubicle. It was disturbing, to be where the girl had spent her last, lonely hours. She removed her shoes, then waited, making herself count to fifty. Then, as silently as she could, she tweaked up the hanging, slid under it and tiptoed along the dormitory and out of the door. She knew, as did all the nuns, that the third of the wooden stairs tended to creak, so she stepped straight from the second to the fourth. Then, still with exaggerated caution, she went on down to ground level.

She had just put her shoes back on when, some minutes later, Josse appeared at the top of the short flight of steps.

‘I didn’t hear you,’ he said. ‘I had my eyes shut, and I called out to you, and you didn’t answer, so I knew you’d gone. I didn’t hear a thing,’ he repeated, ‘and
I
was wide awake! I was listening out for you!’

‘I know.’ She felt strangely excited, affected by this small discovery that it was perfectly possible for someone to leave the dormitory unheard. She said, genuinely wanting to know, ‘What now?’

The light in his face drained away, and he said sombrely, ‘Now, please, you show me where she was found.’

Helewise led him out of the rear gate of the convent. It gave on to the track that wound down into the vale; after only a few yards, the rooftops of the shrine and the monks’ house came into view. Soon after that, she branched off on to a lesser-used track, which became steeper as it neared the valley floor.

She had not been down here since they’d found Gunnora.

‘She lay there.’ Helewise pointed. ‘Just off the path. Right in the open, which was odd.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘You’d have thought whoever killed her might have tried to hide the body. A belated discovery of the murder surely would have helped him, if only to give him longer to get away.’

‘It was more than not hiding her,’ Helewise said slowly. ‘It looked for all the world as if he’d been quite determined we would find her. She’d been –
arranged.
’ It was the best word she could think of.

‘Arranged,’ he repeated.

‘Her arms and legs made a sort of star pattern’ – oh, it was hard, remembering! – ‘and it seemed that some trouble had been taken to make the shape as perfect as possible.’

‘Dreadful,’ he muttered. ‘Callous, and quite horrible.’

She didn’t want to, but she knew she must tell him the rest. ‘Her skirts were folded back so neatly. I noticed that.’ Realising her omission, she said, ‘I did not find her – two of the lay brothers did, only a matter of minutes after the search began. I was just coming down from the Abbey, and I heard them shout. I was the third one to look on her.’

‘I see.’ His voice held compassion. ‘Go on. You were telling me about her skirt.’

‘Yes.’ She swallowed. ‘The skirt and underskirt had been folded as one, and there were three folds. The first raised the garments to knee level, the second to thigh level, the third placed them across her belly. She was, as I think you know, naked from the waist down. And covered in blood.’

Her voice was shaking. She clenched her teeth, hoping he wouldn’t ask her anything else until she had recovered her equanimity.

He didn’t. Instead, he wandered slowly around the place where Gunnora had been found. It was impossible even for Helewise, who had seen her, to say exactly where the dead girl had lain; the small amount of blood that had trickled down into the grass had been ground in by the many boot and shoe soles that had trampled the scene. It was not, then, immediately clear what Josse was gaining from his long perusal. Perhaps he was just giving her some time.

Eventually he returned to stand beside her.

‘There was something about a cross, a jewelled cross?’ he asked quietly.

‘Yes. They found it there, at the bend in the path.’ She pointed.

‘A rape that wasn’t, and a stolen cross that was thrown away. Although it is difficult to see why, unless it was by accident, since the murderer was not being pursued.’

‘Not by us,’ Helewise said. ‘It is possible that someone else saw him.’

‘Someone who prefers not to advertise his presence here in the dead of night?’

‘Quite.’

‘Hm,’ he said. And, again, walking a few paces away, ‘Hmmm.’

She said, ‘About the cross.’

He turned, alert eyes on her. ‘Yes?’

‘It wasn’t Gunnora’s. It was very similar to hers, same gold mounting, same size and colour of ruby. But Gunnora gave hers to me a few months ago, and asked instead to wear a cross of plain wood.’

‘She did? Why?’

That was easy. ‘As a demonstration of poverty, I think.’ A very ostentatious show, Helewise had thought privately at the time, and not a very useful one since Gunnora had specifically asked Helewise to put the cross away safely for her. It would have been more convincing had she asked her Abbess to sell the pretty thing and use the proceeds for the poor.

‘So she would not have been wearing her own jewelled cross when she died?’

‘No.’ It was still secure in Helewise’s cabinet; she had checked. Now the other one, that was found beside her, was there with it. ‘The wooden cross was still round her neck, but it had somehow slipped under her scapula. Probably only another nun would have thought to look for it.’

‘A rape that wasn’t,’ Josse repeated thoughtfully, ‘and, now, a theft that wasn’t.’ He stared at Helewise. ‘Abbess, all we seem to be left with is murder.’

Chapter Five

They walked side by side back up the slope to the Abbey, on its ridge. He did not have to shorten his stride greatly; she was a tall woman.

Seen from this side, the Abbey presented a less stoutly walled aspect. Well, Josse reflected, that was understandable; the entrance through which he had first arrived faced the road, and, even if traffic was light, establishments of the size and prestige of Hawkenlye Abbey usually marked out their territory behind high walls and a solid gate that could be locked and barred at night.

Coming up from the pleasant green vale whose tranquillity had so recently been violated, however, the Abbey appeared less formidable, and the gate did not appear, Josse thought, to be any great deterrent to someone determined to break in. That, too, was understandable, since a section of the Abbey’s community lived down there in the valley, and, presumably, required fairly free access to the main foundation.

Nevertheless, it was food for thought.

He stared up at the Abbey as they neared the gate. Now that he had been inside, he could piece together the layout of the various buildings. From down here, as from the road, the roof of the church dominated; running along one side of the church was what he now knew to be the hospital wing. On the other side was the long room where the nuns slept. It was sightly taller than the hospital wing; he recalled the short flight of steps he and the Abbess had climbed to reach the door. There would, he assumed, be a stair leading directly from the dormitory to the church, for the sisters’ use when they were summoned from their beds for the night offices.

The large group of buildings forming three sides of a square around the cloistered courtyard included, he knew, Abbess Helewise’s small room, and also, he surmised, the refectory and the reformatory. Stables and what looked like workshops and storage rooms had been on his right as he came in through the main gate, and, on his left, had been the porteress’s lodge.

His eyes scanned the remaining buildings. Situated just inside the Abbey’s rear wall, they now rose up to dominate the view in front of him. Both were built to the left of the church and close to it; indeed, one appeared to adjoin it. The other, slightly smaller building, was set apart, in the place where the side and rear walls met to form a corner.

From its position, he guessed that it must be the leper house. If so, then it was from there that the sealed passage led to the part of the church reserved for the exclusive use of the lepers and the sisters who cared for them. It was an area of the foundation which Josse fervently hoped he would not have to investigate.

Satisfied that he now had a mental map of the Abbey buildings, he let his thoughts return to the murder.

His mind reverberated all over again from the Abbess’s new revelation. A rich cross, left at the scene – no,
planted
at the scene, for it had not belonged to the dead woman – surely could only amount to another attempt to confuse the facts? Make Gunnora’s murder seem like a bungled theft, just as the murderer had tried to make it look like rape?

He could no longer ignore his strong conviction that, whoever had cut her throat, it certainly hadn’t been riff-raff released from the local jail. Unless, that is, the jail had enclosed within its walls someone with a more sophisticated mind than your average poacher, pickpocket, sheep thief, or drunkard who had let his fists get the better of his common sense.

My job here is done, Josse reflected as he and the Abbess reached the convent walls. I could return now to Tonbridge, notify the local officials of my findings, and there would no longer be any question of King Richard’s gesture of humanity having led to brutal death. They would surely accept, as I do, that there is far more to this crime than a casual, spur-of-the-moment assault that went too far.

But he knew he wasn’t going to return to Tonbridge just yet. How much more thoroughly would his task be achieved, how much more praiseworthy it would be, if he were able to say not only who
didn’t
do the deed, but who
did.

Well, if he were going to go through with it – as everything in him was urging – then the next step was clear. Unpleasant – in fact, in view of the continuing heat, extremely unpleasant – but quite obvious.

‘Abbess Helewise?’

Until he himself broke the silence, neither had spoken since they had left the spot where Gunnora had been found. He reflected that a nun made an admirable companion when you had things to run over in your mind. Especially – he turned to look at her – one whose wide brow and penetrating eyes spoke so clearly of intelligence.

‘Yes?’ she replied, acknowledging with a brief dip of her head his courteous gesture of standing back to allow her to go through the gate first.

‘Abbess, I have to ask your permission for a task which I wish were not necessary.’ He paused. Lord, was he right?
Was
it necessary? He wished, not for the first time, that he had more experience of murder. That this particular case were not his baptism into the art of investigation.

But, even if he was new to investigating brutal crimes, he had his common sense and his logic, both of which told him that what he was about to ask was essential. Before he could change his mind, he said, ‘Madam, I have to see the body.’

She didn’t answer straightaway, but he noticed that she seemed suddenly to be steering their steps towards the church. Above its door, he observed, was a particularly finely carved tympanum. ‘It is two weeks, more or less, since she was found,’ the Abbess remarked.

‘Aye. I know.’

‘And it is July, sir. An unusually hot July.’

‘Aye.’

They stood together at the church door. She was watching him, a hand up to her eyes to shade them from the brilliant light. He returned her stare, resisting the temptation to hang his head as if in shame at being caught out in a salacious thought. He could not read her expression: it was is if her face were smoothed out. The smile which quirked her wide mouth and raised the well-shaped cheeks was absent, and it was only now that it wasn’t there that he realised he was already recognising it as characteristic of her.

He was about to press his request, explain why he was making it, when she reached out and lifted the heavy latch. ‘I will show you the way,’ she said quietly.

He followed her down a short flight of steps into the church. She made her genuflection, which he copied, then walked up the aisle, past what appeared to be a totally enclosed side chapel – the lepers’ chapel? – then, turning to her left some five paces in front of the altar, opened another, much smaller door. This, too, gave on to steps, but in this case not a wide, shallow flight carved of stone, but a narrow and steep little spiral made of wood.

The smell, which he had scarcely noticed in the church, had increased tenfold with the opening of the little door.

She made her careful way down the stairs. Over her shoulder, he saw the soft light of a candle. They emerged into a low crypt, its domed roof supported by massive stone pillars. He had the sudden sense of being buried deep in the earth, accompanied by an alarming recognition of the unbelievable weight of stone above him, pressing down on him. An atavistic dread shot through him, and he felt a slight prickling as the small hairs on the back of his neck and along his spine stood up.