The Devil's Acolyte (2002) (10 page)

He didn’t notice the small handful of nails that were also missing.

On the following Monday, Simon was woken by an agitated voice. He opened his eyes and recognised the red-headed acolyte he had seen at the coining.

‘What the . . .’ he demanded, pulling his cloak back over his nakedness before rubbing his tired eyes.

The night before, he had been invited to a feast with the Abbot in celebration of the successful coinage – they were several thousandweight above the previous coining and the Abbot was
delighted with his profits – and Simon’s head was naturally more than a little woolly. He felt fine, he told himself, but at the moment he wanted water rather than food. There was a
faint odour of vomit in the air, and he wondered fleetingly whether he had been sick over himself, but then he focused again on the red-headed novice.

‘What’s your name, boy?’ he growled.

‘Gerard, Sir Bailiff.’

‘Well, Gerard, you must learn that, in future, when you come to the room of a man who has enjoyed your master’s hospitality, you should bring a pot of water or wine.’

He looked about him. This room was the main chamber for respected visitors – the servants and lower classes must sleep in the stables or out in the yard itself – and Simon stretched
contentedly in the bed. For once he had been able to sleep alone. Usually when he came to the coinings, he was forced to share his bed.

This morning the chamber was quiet. There had been several guests the night before, but they seemed to have gone already. Most of the beds were already empty; only one still had an occupant, a
yellow-faced, rather dissipated pewterer, who lay on his back, breathing in heavily, then puffing out gusts with faint, but now Simon could concentrate, deeply annoying, popping sounds. At the side
of his bed was a small pool of vomit. Simon wrinkled his nose.

‘Doesn’t matter what you eat, there are always peas and carrot in it,’ he muttered.

‘Sir, the Abbot . . . I mean . . . Oh! Sir, I am . . .’

Stifling a yawn, Simon looked up at the lad. ‘Don’t be flustered, just speak slowly and clearly. My head isn’t all it has been.’

‘Sir, the Abbot asked me to call you because Wally has been found dead on the Moors.’

Fast asleep on a bench in the adjoining room, Hugh had a rude awakening when his master roared in his ear to rouse himself, and then booted him off the bench and on to the floor.

Simon stormed from the chamber, and his eruption, and the hasty slapping of Hugh’s boots on the flooring, woke the yellow-faced pewterer in the bed across from Simon. A scrawny man in his
early thirties, he yawned, scratching at his thin beard and groin. Then he stood and walked to the window, gazing out through the branches of the tree that grew outside, and then, since all was
silent, he returned to his bed and idly thrust a hand beneath the mattress, pulling out a leather satchel. Opening it, he rootled about inside for a moment, but then his face sharpened with the
realisation that something was wrong. He emptied his satchel onto the bed, staring down at the contents with shock, his eyes dark with suspicion.

That the man was dead was not in question. Just the smell was enough for Simon’s belly to rebel. He had to swallow hard. Grabbing at the wineskin dangling from his
saddle, he took a good gulp to wash away the bile. Hugh, on his pony at Simon’s side, reached for the skin, but Simon irritably slapped his hand away. His servant didn’t need it –
or rather, there was a priority of need in which Hugh came a long way below his master.

His guide was Hal Raddych, the stern-looking miner Simon had watched at the coining. Below his hat’s brim and above his bushy beard, his left eye peered out intelligently enough, although
his right had a heavy cast that made it confusing to speak to Hal face to face. He was reasonably wealthy, compared with other miners Simon had met, a steady man, honest and reliable, who worked
with Hamelin not far away.

As Stannary Bailiff, Simon had grown to know most of the miners on the moors, and he thought that Hal was as fair-minded a man as could be found. Many weren’t. The harsh life of the miner
seemed to forge men who had a certain resilience, a toughness of character which made them more prone to fighting even than the peasants who lived on the fringes of the wasteland. And those
bastards were hard enough, Simon reminded himself.

Hal chewed at his inner lip for a moment, then said slowly, ‘Poor old Wally. You know, Sir Bailiff – Walwynus. You must have met him? Used to have his own small claim over there,
beyond Misery Tor, down at the Skir Gut. Worked a stream. Had a good year some summers ago, but bugger all since, by all account. Wally tried to keep a smallholding going, and you know how
difficult that’s been since the famine. What with the dreadful weather, it’s a miracle anyone can live by farming.’

Simon grunted in acknowledgement, staring at Wally’s remains. The body was curled, foetus-like, into a ball, hands and arms over his head in a posture of defence. Two fingers were missing,
which wasn’t out of the ordinary: most miners lost fingers as a matter of course, just as timber workers and carpenters did. It was a natural risk of working with exceptionally sharp, heavy
tools. Except in this man’s case, the fingers had gone recently, from the look of the fleshy mess where they had been. There was a balled piece of cloth nearby, clotted with blood, as though
it had fallen from his fist as he died.

Simon reluctantly passed the wineskin to Hugh and let himself down from his horse. He had no wish to approach the corpse and inspect its death wounds, but he knew he must do a formal
identification if possible. It was a Bailiff’s duty. Personally, Simon was happy to leave all the actual handling of the corpse to the Coroner and his jury. They were welcome to it, he
thought queasily, standing over the body, waving under his nose an apple which he had wisely taken from the Abbey’s kitchen and stuffed with cloves before setting off on this journey. It
helped to neutralise a little of the hideous stench.

The body was lying between two furze bushes. One in particular was almost as tall as a tree. From here, south and east of Nun’s Cross, near Childe’s Tomb, not far from the marked
track of the Abbot’s Way, Simon could see more furze westwards, and grass, with the view extending all the way to the trees that stood on the hill above Tavistock. Before him, the path
dropped down into the thickly wooded valley. Beyond, on the other side of the cleft in the ground, he could see glimpses of the moorland. Tors stood like oddly-carved statues left by the giants who
had once inhabited this land. It was a harsh, bleak landscape, covered with tufts of grasses and occasional lumps of stone. The sort of land to break a man’s ankle if he wasn’t careful;
or break his head.

Except this man hadn’t fallen and knocked himself out. His head was a blackened mass, his hair matted and thickened with great gouts of blood which had spattered and marked the grass all
about. There was a broad slick of it on a nearby furze bush, and Simon noted it. He would have to look at that later: it didn’t look natural.

The victim had been severely beaten, from the look of him. The back of his skull was opened, with a three-inch-long gash that must have come from a heavy weapon. From what Simon could see
Walwynus had tried to protect himself, for his forearms and left hand were broken, one whitened bone thrust through the skin of his right arm, and maggots had already begun to squirm in the
flesh.

It was that which made Simon move away; the sight made his stomach churn. Truth be told, he’d have preferred to remain in the Abbey and leave this job to another official, but he was the
Bailiff; under the Abbot he was responsible for keeping the King’s Peace out on the moors, and if there was a possibility he might learn something about this man’s murder by visiting
the place, he had to make the effort.

The Coroner had already been sent for. Simon knew that Sir Roger de Gidleigh, the Coroner based in Exeter, would come as soon as he could, but that might mean a couple of days. There was never
any shortage of suspicious deaths in the Shire and this one would have to take its place in the queue. In the meantime, the body had to be protected. That was the responsibility of the people who
lived near the corpse, to see that no dogs or rats got to it and damaged it. It was illegal to move the body or bury it; either was a serious offence that could only result in fines being imposed,
so Simon knew that he would have to arrange for guards to look after the corpse until the Coroner could arrive.

He walked away from the body, towards the splash of vivid colour on the furze bush. It looked as if someone had taken a brush and painted it a dull red in a broad swipe. Peering down beneath the
bush, Simon saw something, and he reached inside, wincing as the sharp thorns deep in among old growth stabbed at his hand and wrist.

He withdrew a heavy baulk of timber, maybe a foot and a half long and three inches square. One end was darker, and there was one little greyish lump stuck to it that Simon felt unhappily sure
was a piece of bone. When he studied it more closely, he could see the small round-headed nails embedded within the hardwood, turning it into a more effective weapon, a ‘morning star’.
Obviously the killer had thrown this weapon aside after killing Walwynus. He would have had no use for it after that.

‘Look at this, Hal.’

The miner peered at the piece of timber. There was a curious stillness about him, but Simon noticed it only in passing. It was no surprise, he thought. Old Hal must be feeling in a state of
shock, maybe close to throwing up. He left Hal there while he took another look under the bush.

Hal said, ‘It’s just an old piece of wood.’

Simon could see nothing else at the bush. He took the timber back and studied it again. There were some scratches at the base, three lines with a fourth connecting them, like a set of vertical
stones topped by another one.

‘What’s this?’

Hal glanced at it. ‘Just some marks, nothing more. Could be a child did it. Let’s see whether there’s anything nearer him. Come on!’

Simon scrutinised it a short while longer, but there was nothing more to be learned. He dropped the club beside the bush and rejoined Hal, who was poking hopefully around another bush. Simon
asked, ‘Where was his smallholding?’

‘Over towards Skir Ford. There was a deserted farm there and he took the house and began working the land. Not that he did very well. Too much rain. Nothing grows well here in the
moors.’

‘That’s no more than a mile from here,’ Simon considered, gazing north as though he might be able to see the place. ‘What was he doing here?’ He snatched the
wineskin back from Hugh as he saw it being upended again.

‘Coming back from the coining, probably,’ Hal said, gratefully accepting a drink.

‘Was he there?’

‘Yes. I saw him at the market.’

‘I see. You’re sure he had no money?’

The miner shook his head and spat, glancing back at the corpse for a moment. ‘No. He had nothing – nothing saved, nothing to spend, nothing worth stealing.’

‘He had something,’ Simon said shortly as he thrust his foot into his stirrup and sprang up. ‘Otherwise, why should someone kill him?’

What was the motive for Wally’s death. That was the thought which nagged at Simon as he and Hugh rode over to the dead man’s home. A squat thatched cottage with
small windows, the place was tatty and unkempt, like most of the miners he knew; like Wally himself. The wood was rotten at the door and shutters; the thatch was green and sprouted weeds. Moss
covered the smoother stretches, and birds had dug holes in among the straws. It looked scarcely waterproof. A small shower would pass through it as though through fine linen.

Behind the dwelling was a small, weed-infested patch of unhealthy plants: alexanders, cabbages, carrots and onions. The latter had fungus rotting their stems, and the carrots all looked brown
and decaying.

Hugh drew up his nose. ‘As a gardener he made a good miner.’

‘Remember he’s dead,’ Simon said sharply.

‘Can’t forget, can I? Not after seeing him. Still, truth is truth, and this is a midden.’

Simon couldn’t help but agree with him, and it was no better inside. The cottage had a damp odour that the Bailiff was sure came from mushrooms in the walls or timbers. It was as though
the house itself was dying, like a faithful hound that expires on seeing its master’s dead body.

Dank and foul it was, but there was no sign of a disturbance of any kind, nor of a theft. If Simon had to guess, he would have said that the place was as Wally had left it. On a rough table
constructed of three long planks nailed together lay a jug, a cup and a purse, which was empty. Two stools sat nearby, while there was a barrel of ale standing in a corner. A palliasse leaking
straw lay in a pool of brown water, and a small box was propped against a wall. Inside were Wally’s pathetic possessions: a small sack of flour, a thick coat, some gloves – all the
accoutrements of a peasant with little or no money.

So why should someone kill him if there was nothing to steal?

All the way back, that was the thought that circled round and round in Simon’s aching head. When the two reached the steep hill on the way back to Tavistock, he had come no nearer to a
conclusion. Walwynus was only a poor miner, after all, if Hal was right. A miner who had lost much of his livelihood since the famine years, and whose miserable plot of land wasn’t enough to
sustain body and soul.

He could recall the man. Walwynus had been out on the moors when Simon first came here to take on his new job as Warden, although he had stopped mining soon afterwards. Wally had been a pleasant
enough fellow, the sort of man who laboured daily whatever the weather, enduring steady, repetitive toil that would break most men’s muscles and spirit in hours, stolidly digging his pits and
turning soil near rivers, always looking for new signs of tin.

Yet as Hugh said, he could not be called a gardener. His vegetables wouldn’t have served to support him through the winter, let alone given him excess produce to sell. So how had he
survived?