approximate bulk of Master Thomas’s person, and round about it the grass was trodden, as though someone, or perhaps more than one, had circled all round him as he lay dead. And so they surely had, for here he must have been stripped and searched, the first of those fruitless searches Brother Cadfael had deduced from the events following. Out of the hollow, down to the raised bank of the river, went the track by which he had been dragged, the grass, growing longer as it emerged from shade, all brushed in one direction. Nor was there any doubt about the traces of blood, meagre though they were. The sliver of birch bark under the tree showed a thin crust, dried black. Careful search found one or two more spots, and a thin smear drawn downhill, where it seemed the dead man had been turned on his back to be hauled the more easily down to the water.
“It’s deep here,” said Hugh, standing on the green hillock above the river, “and undercuts the bank, it would take him well out into the current. I fancy the clothes went after him at once, we may find the rest yet. One man could have done it. Had they been two, they would have carried him.”
“Would you say,” wondered Cadfael, “that this is a reasonable way he might take to get back to his barge? He’d know his boat lay somewhat downriver from the bridge, I suppose he might try a chance cut through from the Foregate, and overcast by a little way. You see the end of the jetty, where the barge tied up, is only a small way upstream from us. Would you say he was alone, and unsuspecting, when he was struck down?”
Hugh surveyed the ground narrowly. It was not the scene of a struggle, there was the flattened area of the body’s fall, and the trampling of feet all round its stillness. The brushings of the grass this way and that were ordered, not the marks of a fight.
“Yes. There was no resistance. Someone crept behind, and pierced him without word or scruple. He went down and lay. He was on his way back, preferring the byways, and came out a little downstream of where he aimed. Someone had been watching and following him.”
“The same night,” said Philip flatly, “someone had been watching and following me.”
He had their attention at once, both of them eyeing him with sharp interest.
“The same someone?” suggested Cadfael mildly.
“I haven’t told you my own part,” said Philip. “It went out of my head when I stumbled on this place, and guessed at what it meant. What I set out to do was to find out just what I did that night, and prove I never did murder. For I’d come to think that whoever intended this killing had his eye on me from the start. I came from that riot on the jetty, with my head bleeding and my mood for murder, I was a gift, if I could but be out of sight and mind when murder was done.” He told them everything he had discovered, word for word. By the end of it they were both regarding him with intent and frowning concentration.
“The man Fowler?” said Hugh. “You’re sure of this?”
“Walter Renold is sure, and I think him a good witness. The man was there to be seen, I pointed him out, and Wat told me what he’d seen of him that night.
Fowler looked in, saw and heard the condition I was in, and went away again for it might be as much as half an hour, says Wat. Then he came back, took one measure of ale to drink, and bought a big flask of geneva spirit.”
“And left with it unopened,” Brother Cadfael recalled, “as soon as you took yourself off with your misery into the bushes. No need to blush for it now, we’ve all done as foolishly once or twice in our lives, many of us have bettered it. And the next that’s known of him,” he said, meeting Hugh’s eyes across the glade, “is two hours later, when we discover him lying sodden-drunk under a store of trestles by the Foregate.”
“And Wat of the tavern swears he was sober as a bishop when he quit the inn.”
“And I would swear by Wat’s judgment,” said Philip stoutly. “If any man drank that flagon dry in two hours, he says, it would be the death of him, or go very near. And Fowler was testifying in court next day, and little the worse for wear.”
“Good God!” said Hugh, shaking his head. “I stooped over him, I pulled back the cloak from his shoulders. The fellow reeked. His breath would have felled an ox.
Am I losing my wits?”
“Or was it rather the reek you loosed by moving the cloak? I begin to have curious thoughts,” said Cadfael, “for I fancy that juniper liquor was bought for his outside, not his inside.”
“A costly freak,” mused Hugh, “the price such liquors are. Cheap enough, though, if it bought him immunity from all suspicion of a thing that could have cost him a deal higher. What was the first thing I said??more fool I! By the look of him, I said, he must have been here some hours already. And where did he go from there? Safely into an abbey punishment cell, and lay there overnight. How could he be guilty of anything but being a drunken sot? Children and drunken men are the world’s only innocents! If murder was done that night, who was to look at a man who had put himself out of the reckoning from the time Master Thomas was last seen alive to the time when his body was brought back to Shrewsbury?”
Cadfael’s mind had probed even beyond that point, though nothing beyond was yet clear. “I have a fancy, Hugh, to look again at the place where we picked up that sodden carcase, if it can be found. Surely an honest drunk should have had his bottle lying beside him for all to see. But I remember none. If we missed it, and some stray scavenger found it by night, still half-full or more, well and good. But if by any chance it was hidden?so that no questions need ever be asked about how much had been drunk, and what manner of head could have borne it?would that be the act of a simple sot? He could not walk through the fairground stinking as he did, whether from outside or in. His baptism was there, where we found him tucked away. So should his bottle have been.”
“And if he was neither simple nor a sot that night, Cadfael, how do you read his comings and goings? He looked in at the tavern, took note of this lad’s state, listened to his complaints, and went away?where?”
“As far as Master Thomas’s booth, perhaps, to make sure the merchant was there, busy about his wares, and likely to be busy for a while longer? And so back to the tavern to keep watch on Philip, so handy a scapegoat, and so clearly on the way to ending the evening blind and deaf. And afterwards, when he had followed him far enough into the copse to know he was lost to the world, back to dog Master Thomas’s footsteps as he made his way back to the barge. Made his way, mat is, as far as this place.”
“It is all conjecture,” said Hugh reasonably.
“It is. But read it so, and it makes sense.”
“Then back with his flask of spirits ready, to slip unseen into a place withdrawn and private, and become the wretched object we found. How long would it take, would you say, to kill his man, search and strip him down to the river?”
