He thrust Bartholomew away from him with a glare, and strode back to the church, calling for a clerk to send for one of the Proctors. Michael watched de Wetherset go.
'Do you really think Gilbert is our man?' he asked.
Bartholomew shifted his bag into a more comfortable position. 'He is most certainly involved, would you not think? For a man who helped retrieve a corpse that had been nailed to a bellframe, he reacted very strongly over the mere opening of a coffin. Unless he already knew what we would find.'
'You are right,' said Michael, thinking carefully. I have been wondering whether one of the clerks has been acting as a spy. Who better than Gilbert, who is privy to all the Chancellor's secrets? That is why we have had so little success with our investigation. The perpetrators of these crimes have known exactly what we have been thinking and planning!'
Bartholomew rubbed his chin. 'Remember when we almost dug up Mistress Archer's grave because the marker Gilbert left was on the wrong tomb?'
Michael stared at him. 'Cuthbert said children must have moved it. But what if it had never been moved at all, and it was exactly where Gilbert had set it?'
'And he must have known precisely where to find the path,' said Bartholomew, looking back at where the bushes once again hid it from sight. 'He went there without hesitation. His arrival in Primrose Lane must have alerted them to the possibility of pursuit, and so the archer was set there.' 'I wonder what goes on in Primrose Lane that warrants such security?' mused Michael.
Bartholomew considered. Was that it? Did the seedy shacks and hovels behind the church hold the secret that would explain the deaths of the friar, Froissart, Nicholas, and the disappearance of Buckley? 'What can we do?' he said helplessly. 'We cannot ask Tulyet to raid it, because he is probably involved; it is beyond the Proctor's powers, because Gilbert disappearing down that path is insufficient to prove that it is University business; and if there are archers and crowds of ruffians on guard, we can do nothing ourselves.'
He turned as a large figure lurched out of the church. As Bartholomew and Michael waited for Cuthbert to reach them they saw tears glittering on his cheeks.
'Is it true?' he said. 'Does Nicholas lie dead in the crypt?'
Michael nodded, eyeing him suspiciously.
'He has been with me this past week. I confess it was a shock to see him out of his grave, but he told me he had needed to escape.'
'Escape what?' asked Bartholomew, bewildered.
Cuthbert shrugged, giving a huge sniff, and rubbing his face with his sleeve. 'He would not say, but he was clearly terrified. He said I would be safer not knowing.'
'Why did you not tell us?' cried Michael, exasperated.
'Because he said if I told anyone he was still alive, I would place him in mortal danger, and myself, too,' said Cuthbert, his voice rising. 'I am certain he told me the truth. I have never seen him so frightened or angry.' He looked up suddenly. That lay-brother who locked the church for me saw him once. He came to me and said he had seen Nicholas risen from the dead.
I advised him to keep silent, and the next thing I knew was that he had fled the town.'
'Cuthbert!' exclaimed Bartholomew in disgust. 'Nicholas may have been the man who killed those women! How could you keep silent?'
'He was not!' cried Cuthbert vehemently. 'He would never kill,' he added more gently.
'But a dead woman was found in his coffin,' said Bartholomew. 'How can you explain that?'
'When we exhumed the grave, Nicholas had already come to me,' said Cuthbert. 'It was no surprise to me that he was not in the grave we dug up, but I was not expecting another corpse! When I returned home, I told him what we had found, and he became frantic with grief. He believed she was the woman he had been seeing before he escaped.'
'But why did you not tell us all this?' cried Michael in despair. 'Did you not recognise her?'
Cuthbert shook his head. 'She had thick black hair, and the woman in the coffin was bald. I told Nicholas it could not be his lover, but he said she had a disease whereby her hair fell out and she always wore a wig.'
That is not proof that he did not kill her,' said Michael.
'He loved her,' said Cuthbert earnestly. 'I met her, and it is clear that they made each other very happy.
He would not have harmed her. And we were members of the Guild of the Holy Trinity, a group dedicated to opposing sin. We do not kill!'
Bartholomew looked at him disbelievingly, while Michael walked with the distraught priest to his small house nearby. Bartholomew waited restlessly until Michael returned.
'Now what?' he said, exasperated. 'What a mess!'
'We must think,' said Michael, sitting down on the low wall surrounding the churchyard. 'Cuthbert claims that Nicholas returned a week ago in a state of terror.'
'We should start with his death,' said Bartholomew.
'He clearly feigned it, and if Cuthbert can be believed, he did so because he was afraid of something.'
'Yes,' said Michael. 'And what better way to escape danger than to pretend you are dead? Who ever hunts a corpse?'
'If the woman was Nicholas's lover, then she must have helped him feign his death, perhaps with potions and powders. Then she went to help him out of the coffin the night before he was due to be buried.'
'And then what?' asked Michael. 'We can prove nothing else. Did he kill her then to ensure her silence so that he would be safe? And why was she wearing that hideous mask?'
'Whatever happened, Nicholas fled, and then returned a week ago,' said Bartholomew. 'When Cuthbert told him that a bald woman was found in his coffin, he realised who it was, and took to roaming the streets.'
'But what could be so terrifying that he was forced to such measures?' mused Michael. 'It must be something to do with the book. Perhaps he was being threatened into revealing its contents.'
Bartholomew considered. 'You must be right,' he said. 'After Nicholas 'died', whoever was terrifying him realised that alternative methods were needed to get at it. The friar was employed to steal the book, but was accidentally killed by the poisoned lock.'
'Which must mean that, as far as we know, whatever deadly secret led to all this is still there,' said Michael.
'Because de Wetherset seemed to have checked it all very carefully to ensure nothing was missing/ 'So did the person behind all this kill Nicholas?' asked Bartholomew.
Michael shrugged. 'It must be the same person who killed Froissart because they were both garrotted. It must be Gilbert.'
'Of course it must!' said Bartholomew suddenly.
'Gilbert has the only key to the crypt. It can only have been him who took the woman's body away and put Nicholas there.' 'It does not tell us why,' said Michael. 'But it does throw light on how the friar ended up inside the chest, dead, with the lid down. Gilbert must have used his keys to hide in the crypt, unbeknownst to the friar, before the lay-brother locked up, and emerged after the friar had gone to the tower to begin opening the chest. He probably had no intention other than to ensure his plan went smoothly. He must have become worried when the friar took so long, and went to see what had happened.
He found the friar dead, and, in a panic, he pushed him into the chest and closed the lid.'
'De Wetherset said no pages were missing,' said Bartholomew. 'If Gilbert had gone to all this trouble, surely he must have stolen the part he wanted?'
Michael scratched his head thoughtfully. 'I am sure he did,' he said. 'When we lifted the friar from the chest, de Wetherset was only concerned about the book. He immediately went to check that certain sections were unmolested. The part Gilbert probably took must have been so unimportant to the Chancellor, he failed to notice it was missing. So there are at least two parts of this book that are important: the part that de Wetherset was so concerned with, and the part Gilbert took.'
Bartholomew thought again. 'Gilbert was not unduly worried about the friar's sudden death: after all, there was nothing to connect him with the dead man. He left the church, first removing the bar that the friar had put across the door for added security. One of the clerks mentioned to me later that the bar had been moved, proving that there had been two people in the church when the friar had died, not one.'
'Who was this Father Lucius who was allowed into the church by Froissart?' said Michael. 'Could that have
