The Tainted Relic by Michael Jecks, The Medieval Murderers Page A

something in the Bush last night,’ he boomed. As they hurried back towards Idle Lane, the officer explained that he had managed to round up another dozen men who had been drinking in the tavern, and one of them remembered seeing a hooded man coming down the ladder late that night. ‘He says he wasn’t in a priest’s garb, but the hood was over his face and he had no cause to make any effort to recognize him.’
    ‘At least it lessens the threat against Nesta, if we have a new possibility,’ muttered John. ‘Have you kept this man at the Bush?’
    ‘They’re all there, Crowner. I told them they must wait until you came.’
    The new witnesses were in the taproom when they arrived, taking advantage of the wait to drink more ale. John questioned the man Gwyn had found, but he was unable to add any more to his recollection that the hooded man had come down the steps and vanished out of the front door.
    ‘His robe was grey and dirty, Crowner. I can say no more about him than that he was tall.’
    John questioned all the other men, but none of them had noticed the mysterious figure, and he became frustrated that there seemed no way of identifying the fellow.
    ‘He may have nothing to do with it,’ cautioned Thomas tentatively. ‘Perhaps he was one of the other lodgers from the loft.’
    Nesta shook her head as she stood listening. ‘None of those travellers was particularly tall–and none wore a dirty grey robe,’ she said firmly.
    John de Wolfe snarled again at the men, trying to force someone to remember more details, but they all shook their heads sadly, despite the fact that they would have liked to help both the coroner and his popular mistress.
    Then suddenly there was a voice from behind him, a sing-song piping that came from a vacant-faced youth who had been squatting in a corner.
    ‘I know who he was! I begged him for a ha’penny for ale when he came out of the door.’
    There was a sudden silence as everyone turned to look down at the ragged boy. Though not an idiot, he was ‘simple’, as the tolerant locals called him, a loose-lipped, runny-nosed lad with an abnormally big head. Nesta, who gave him spare food almost every day, crouched down beside him and spoke to him gently.
    ‘Peter, did you see his face? Who was he?’
    The boy looked at her and then at the expectant men with an almost pitying expression.
    ‘Don’t you know? It was Simon Claver, him with the rotten nose that used to live in Smythen Street.’
    At this, there was a babble of voices from the surrounding men, cut short by de Wolfe’s harsh voice.
    ‘Who in hell is Simon Claver?’ he demanded.
    ‘He was a smith, from just up the road here,’ answered the potman.
    ‘Simon beat up his brother-in-law more than a year ago, half killed him!’
    There were murmurs of agreement from the others. ‘He escaped the hue and cry and secured sanctuary in Holy Trinity,’ continued old Edwin, who knew all the local scandals. ‘Then he abjured the realm, but ran away before he got ship at Topsham, so he was outlawed.’
    The coroner looked across at Gwyn and nodded. ‘Sounds as if he could be our man–but where the hell do we look for him?’
     
     
    De Wolfe’s desire to lay his hands on the killer of Gervase was multiplied a thousandfold by that evening, as while he was sitting at his cheerless supper table with Matilda, Gwyn arrived in a state of extreme agitation to report that the sheriff had arrested Nesta on suspicion of murder.
    ‘The bastard sent half a dozen men-at-arms to the Bush and they’ve dragged her off to Rougemont!’
    Though Gwyn was unwelcome in the house because of his wife’s antipathy to what she called ‘Celtic savages’, the urgency of the situation made both him and his master careless of her antagonism.
    ‘There’s even talk of putting her to the ordeal of water,’ roared Gwyn angrily. This was a primitive test for guilt reserved for women, whereby they were thrown bound hand and foot into deep water.