of poisoning. Cynric saw you – three of you – in the shadows in St Michael’s Lane, waiting to slip unnoticed into Michaelhouse as soon as the coast was clear. After you searched his room and found what you wanted, you went to Gonville, where you had heard the messenger tell Walter that Philius had been struck down with a strange illness. You followed Isaac from Philius’s room when he went to fetch the wine he had used in the purge, and you stunned him with a savage blow to the head in the ensuing struggle. You could not risk leaving him alive to identify you, so you hanged him to make certain he would die.’
Katherine gave a short laugh of bemusement. ‘How can you think such a thing of me? How could I hang a man from the rafters? I am only a woman, not a great brawny ox, like you.’
‘From the rafters, was it?’ pounced Michael. ‘But you have not been listening. I said there were three of you, so you did not murder Isaac alone. When you could not find the bottle – which had been smashed by the College cat and lay in pieces under the work-bench – one of you stayed to look again, while the other two went to see if it was still in Philius’s room. It was while you were looking there that Matt disturbed you, and the three of you fled, knocking me over on the way out. But, fortunately for one of you, Matt had found the broken bottle under the bench, and it was an easy matter to scrape up the pieces before you left.’
‘This is all wild nonsense,’ said Katherine in disbelief. She turned to Bartholomew. ‘Has the good Brother been drinking? Is he wholly in his right mind?’
‘Wholly, Mistress,’ said Bartholomew coldly. ‘And you also killed Philius in his bed and chopped Egil’s head from his neck.’
‘Who is Egil?’ asked Katherine with an expression of profound confusion. ‘And why would I do such a foul thing? I am no warlock!’
‘Because he was the smuggler who brought you this wine across the Fens,’ said Bartholomew.
‘But this is outrageous!’ protested Katherine, laughing. ‘This Egil’s head was probably stolen by wild animals.’
‘So that is what we were meant to believe, was it?’ said Michael.
Katherine shook her head in exasperation and went to her husband. ‘Constantine! Why do you stand there and allow them to insult me? Call for the Chancellor and tell him to order these University men away, because I will sue them for slander if they continue in this vein. They are trying to provoke a riot by accusing a townsperson of vile crimes!’
Mortimer looked from her to Bartholomew, bewildered. ‘I do not understand how you arrived at all these conclusions. You have no evidence with which to accuse my wife, only wild guesses.’
In his heart, Bartholomew knew the baker was right. No court of law would find Katherine guilty on the evidence they had. Bartholomew was certain their reasoning was accurate, but the only clue that Katherine was involved came from her apparent attempt to implicate her bullying husband by claiming the wine was his. It was true that she had prevented Edward from drinking it, and provided him with the opportunity to flee, but it was hardly solid proof. He glanced at Michael, seeing his own frustration mirrored in the fat monk’s face.
They all turned at the sound of a violent altercation between John Cheney and another of Tulyet’s men, who was attempting to inspect a large barrel.
‘I will not broach it,’ the spice-merchant was shouting. ‘That is finest quality sea salt and the rain will spoil the contents. I have shown you all the legal documentation for it and you have no right to press me further!’
‘It will take only a moment!’ yelled the soldier in his turn. ‘Your records show it is almost empty anyway. I just want to ensure nothing has been hidden with its legal contents.’
‘But water will ruin the salt,’ shouted Cheney, putting his hand palm up to emphasise his point. Rain fell steadily in fine, misty droplets.
‘We could move it inside,’ suggested the soldier, more quietly.
Cheney considered. ‘Very well, then,’ he conceded in a more reasonable tone of voice. ‘As long as you put it back where you found it.’
The barrel in dispute stood just inside the gates to Cheney’s yard. An idea suddenly formed in Bartholomew’s mind. Katherine and her pugilistic husband forgotten, he walked over to the barrel and tapped on it. It sounded hollow.
‘And what do you think you are doing?’ Cheney snapped, angry again. ‘Get off my property!’
Bartholomew turned to Tulyet and Michael. ‘I wonder if we might … ?’
He stopped as he saw Katherine clutch her throat and sway dizzily. Next to her, Mortimer watched his wife in disbelief as a smoky bottle slipped from her nerveless fingers and smashed on the ground. Tulyet darted forward and caught her as she swooned, but as Bartholomew ran towards them, he could see there was nothing that could be done to save her. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she began to convulse in Tulyet’s arms. Bartholomew called for water to wash the poison from her mouth, but even as he did so, he knew it would do no good. After a few moments, her desperate attempts to breathe eased and she went limp.
‘My God!’ breathed Tulyet in horror. He eased the body onto the ground and looked up at Bartholomew. ‘She is dead already. What
Even a sudden death in one of the town’s busiest thoroughfares did little to slow the frantic activity there. One or two people stopped to look at Katherine Mortimer’s body as it lay in the rain, but most ignored the scene outside the baker’s house, too anxious to ensure their own businesses were in order to risk interfering with someone else’s. Mortimer knelt next to his wife, holding her limp hand in his with an expression of total mystification, as though he imagined she might leap to her feet at any moment and tell him it had been some kind of macabre joke. Tulyet, Michael and Bartholomew stood over him, while the sergeant shouted to one of his men to help carry the body into the house.
‘Do you have any idea at all where this foul stuff came from?’ asked Tulyet, poking one of the bottles in the crate on his cart with his dagger. ‘Or how much of it is currently loose in the town?’
Michael shook his head. ‘I made the erroneous assumption that there were only six bottles in total. Now we find there was a full case of twelve. I have no idea whether this is all of it, or whether another crate is lurking somewhere.’
Bartholomew looked down at the lifeless form of Mistress Mortimer. ‘I have never seen any poison work as quickly as this before. Neither had Philius.’
‘Philius was good with poisons,’ said Tulyet, moving away from the crate with a shudder. ‘He used to help Jonas the Apothecary prepare potions to kill lice and fleas, while his reputation for producing effective concoctions to rid granaries of rats stretched as far afield as Thetford. All the Franciscans in the Friary on Bridge Street are good with herbs and powders.’
‘Well, that’s Franciscans for you!’ muttered Michael. ‘While we Benedictines live our lives in serene contemplation and prayer, the Franciscans find themselves one of the best houses in Bridge Street and find new ways to kill things.’
Something horrible occurred to Bartholomew as he stared down at the lifeless features of Katherine Mortimer. Had he, by encouraging Philius to investigate the nature of the poison that had made him so ill and killed Will Harper, Grene and Armel, inadvertently brought about Philius’s death? He spoke his thoughts aloud.
‘Master Colton of Gonville Hall said he went with Philius to visit the Franciscan Friary – where Philius told me he would ask about this poison among his colleagues. It must have been the fact that he was asking questions that aroused the suspicions of Katherine and her associates, and Philius must have been killed before he could come too close to the truth.’
Michael tapped him smartly on the arm. ‘You could not have prevented Philius’s death, Matt. How were you – or any of us – to know that his asking questions about a kind of poison in his own Friary would make someone want to kill him?’
‘We misjudged Colton, too,’ said Bartholomew, facts coming together in his mind. ‘I was certain his determination to suppress knowledge of Philius’s murder was a sign of guilty involvement. Now I see his suspicious behaviour was nothing more than a desire to keep the Sheriff well away from his College and its activities while he was indulging himself in a little smuggling.’
‘Of course,’ said Michael, nodding. ‘That explains why he was so nervous, and why he tried to claim his College could not be connected to the poisoned wine and the deaths of Grene and Armel – he did not want me or the Sheriff to start digging too deeply into Gonville’s affairs given that the cellars are probably well stocked with all sorts of contraband.’
‘But why would someone kill Philius for asking about the poison?’ asked Tulyet. ‘Its nature is no secret – half
