[William Falconer 06] - Falconer and the Ritual of Death Read online

  Further Titles by Ian Morson

  The Falconer Mysteries

  FALCONER’S CRUSADE

  FALCONER’S JUDGEMENT

  FALCONER AND THE FACE OF GOD

  A PSALM FOR FALCONER

  FALCONER AND THE GREAT BEAST

  FALCONER AND THE RITUAL OF DEATH *

  The Mediaeval Murderers

  THE TAINTED RELIC

  SWORD OF SHAME

  HOUSE OF SHADOWS

  The Niccolo Zuliani Mysteries

  CITY OF THE DEAD *

  * available from Severn House

  FALCONER AND THE RITUAL OF DEATH

  A Master William Falconer Mystery

  Ian Morson

  This first world edition published 2008

  in Great Britain and in 2009 in the USA by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of 9-15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Trade paperback edition published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2009 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  Copyright © 2008 by Ian Morson.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Morson, Ian

  Falconer and the ritual of death

  1. University of Oxford - Fiction 2. Falconer, William (Fictitious character) - Fiction 3. Great Britain - History - Henry HI, 1216-1272 - Fiction 4. Detective and mystery stories

  I. Title

  823.9’14[F]

  ISBN-13:978-0-7278-6702-5 (cased) ISBN-13:978-1-84751-097-6 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  All Severn House titles are printed on acid-free paper.

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd., Grangemouth, Stidingshire, Scotland.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd., Bodmin, Cornwall.

  And first came out the thick, thick blood,

  And next came out the thin,

  And next came out the bonny heart’s blood;

  There was no more within.’

  The Ballad of Hugh of Lincoln

  One

  Feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist, August 1271

  The girl’s body lay on the scrubbed oak surface of the battered table. Soon the table would need another great effort to clean it. It was steeped in blood that trailed across it, and pooled in the gouges and gulleys that marred the surface. The source of all this blood was the flayed chest of the unfortunate girl. Someone had carved open her torso from neck to crotch and peeled the flesh back. Revealed was a mass of soft greyish matter and bone, soaked in red ichor.

  The sight was at once nauseating and bewildering to William Falconer. A regent master of Oxford University he might be, but the inner parts of a human being, and their functions, were as much a mystery to him as God’s purpose for the world.

  He teased his eyeglasses out of the pouch at his waist, and put them on. He had recently fitted side arms to the original armature, which was a V-shaped piece of metal with a lens at each extremity. Previously, he had to hold the lenses to his eyes, making them ungainly and tiring to use. Now, the new adaptation at either side, which hooked over his ear, permitted him to wear them and keep his hands flee. The problem was they were now awkward to carry around, unless he could devise some sort of hinge with which to fold the arms over.

  He peered more closely at the array of internal organs that the lenses brought into sharp focus.

  ‘God’s design is a thing of beauty, don’t you agree?’ The quiet voice came from over his left shoulder, and Falconer, who had not heard anyone approaching, turned sharply.

  The short, bald-headed little man standing behind him would normally have looked the most inoffensive of souls in any other ctrcumstance. But with the wild gleam of excitement in his eyes, and the presence of a bloody blade in his right hand, he would have scared the boldest of warriors in battle. It was a good job that Falconer knew Richard Bonham well, and was aware of his intentions.

  In fact it was Falconer who had asked the little grey man to carry out the horrific act that had been perpetrated on poor Sarah Blakiston, the servant girl who now lay on the butcher’s slab. Of course, Bonham was not a butcher in the normal sense. He was a regent master like Falconer, and a man of science whose keen sense of the practical was only partially hindered by his deeply religious nature. Very few at the University of Oxford even knew that the self-effacing and quite humourless teacher of rhetoric had another side to his character. Successive popes had strictly forbidden the anatomizing of the human body for many years. And few people felt the need to contravene the proscription. But Bonham’s thirst for an understanding of the workings of man, in both a spiritual and a physical sense, had led him down a deeply secret avenue. So secret that even the normally perspicacious Falconer had only found it out by accident.

  Bonham’s gruesome hobby had once made him the suspect in one of Falconer’s murder enquiries.

  Now, Falconer pointed vaguely at the sticky morass before them.

  ‘Where is the gift’s heart?’

  Bonham smirked at the request.

  ‘And you once a soldier, Master William. Surely, of all the parts of the body, you would know where the heart resides.’ Falconer remained patient with his colleague. The man was without a sense of humour other than the gallows sort, but remained a friend. He pointed at the bloody torso.

  ‘I meant, which part of this mess of offal is the girl’s heart?’ Bonham patted Falconer’s arm condescendingly, and indicated the flaccid object just below where he had broken away the left side of the ribcage. Falconer peered more closely.

  ‘Hmm. No indication in its nature then of the state of her feelings.’

  ‘Master Falconer, surely you are aware that a person’s humours reside in the head. If she was melancholic, then it would be her head we should examine.’ He paused, a bloodied finger tapping his lips. ‘Do you wish me to open her skull?’

  Falconer shuddered at the thought, and hastily declined the offer. Her face and long dark hair were, even in death, too sweet to desecrate in such a cruel way.

  ‘No, no, Richard. I just thought that her heart might reveal to me something about her mood. Was she in love? Had she been so cruelly rejected that she would take her own life?’

  This was the crux of why Bonham had been so easily able to obtain the girl’s body for his own nefarious deed. Not only was Sarah Blakiston a servant girl and an orphan to boot, she had also committed the felony of self-murder. If she had owned property, her rash action would have resulted in the confiscation of her goods and chattels. As it was, she had been merely a lowly servant in the house of Sir Gilbert de Bois.

  And he had been only too happy to have her inconvenient body hastily removed from his sight after the legal niceties had been observed.

  Bonham shook his head, and sucked absently on his finger.

  ‘I don’t think you should be looking at her heart to answer that question. You should be seeking a reason for her suicide elsewhere.’

  ‘And where would you suggest, Master Richard?’ Falconer was a little puzzled by Bonham’s cryptic remark.

  Current opinion dictated that the humours were located in the head and blood in the chest, whereas the abdomen was the seat of raw bile. Where else than in the head or the heart would Bonham suggest looking for the cause of melancholia? Falconer was soon to understand the man’s words, however.

/>   Bonham crossed to the other side of the body, and indicated for Falconer to come closer and stand opposite him. When he had so positioned himself, Bonham pointed to the girl’s lower regions. Nakedness was not a cause of embarrassment to Falconer, who saw in it the naturalness of God’s creation. But he was not used to examining the sexual parts of a young Woman, and bridled at the task.

  ‘No, no. Higher up, Master Falconer.’

  Bonham jabbed a finger at the greyish mass below the girl’s coils of stomach pipes.

  ‘Look closely’.

  Falconer obligingly bent over, and peered through the lenses of the contraption on the end of his nose. The heavy rig slipped slightly, and he was obliged to push the lenses back on to the bridge of his nose. But he had seen enough. Curled neatly in the egg-shaped womb that Bonham had carefully incised open was a perfectly formed child.

  Two

  Master Mason Richard Thorpe had a problem. The streets of Oxford were narrow and winding, and he was being asked to work in Little Jewry Lane, the narrowest of the lot.

  Moreover, only two streets away was an alley suggestively called Grope Lane. He had a good idea what went on there.

  And doubtless most of his workers would be sloping off before the end of the day to sniff around the whorehouses. But he could cope with all that. No, his main problem was his employer, Dame Elia Bassett.

  It would not have been so bad if the widow had been fair of face. He could have dealt with her condescendingly. But she was a harridan, and insistent on getting her own way in all things. No wonder her husband had fled this life in the fullness of his years, and with a heavy purse to boot. Now the widow proposed to squander the largest portion of his money on a new building in the university town, ostensibly in memory of her dear departed husband. Not that Thorpe was carping about that. He was earning a good income from the transaction. But Dame Elia was proposing to construct an edifice to house a whole gang of students of the university all together.

  Personally, Thorpe couldn’t see why the old method of lodging the indolent youths in a variety of ramshackle tenements at high rents couldn’t continue. The layabouts deserved nothing better. From what he knew even before he took on the project, most of the students spent their evenings roaming the streets accosting honest, hard-working citizens, and getting drunk. Now he had moved to Oxford for the duration of the task at hand, he had seen that the tales were all truth. And that was another thing. His workers would no doubt also be led astray by the antics of those who should be their betters, if not their elders.

  But when it came down to it, it was still the shrill voice of the dame that he could not cope with. Every interview with her was the same. The longer he tried to take explaining the practical problems, the louder she screeched. She could not see th~ difficulties that faced Thorpe in even preparing the site for building whatever the thing was to be called. He looked again at the orders that lay on the table before him, recalling when ‘th~ dame had described the edifice, and had explained its purpose. It was to be a community - she called it a collegium of students. His Latin wasn’t all that good, so he didn’t understand fully what she was saying. But she had rendered it in God’s English, and there it was - the name she had inscribed on his instructions.

  ‘Bassett College.’

  Thorpe rubbed his dusty hands through his tousled black hair, adding to the streaks of white that were already showing through above his ears. He had no doubt the greyness would be much increased by the end of his present task. And the irony was that he had fought hard to get this commission.

  Very hard. His bright buttons of eyes surveyed the instructions before him, and then lifted to examine the site. He moved from massaging his head to kneading his jowly jaw line. This wasn’t like York, where he had made his home since serving the long apprenticeship that had taken him far and wide. This was like some hellish scene invented by a mad priest. The alleyway before him was already cluttered with rubble, from which rose a column of dust like smoke from the Fiery Fumace.

  Snotty kids were already delving through the remains of the first tenement his workmen had pulled down. They reminded him of imps tormenting those about to be consigned to the fires of Hell. He yelled at them to clear off.

  ‘Wilfrid! Get those kids off the site before they get killed.’ His foreman, covered in filth and white powdery dust, poked his head up above the shattered parapet of the ruined building, and nodded.

  ‘Not that I care if they break their necks,’ muttered Thorpe.

  He watched the lugubrious and slow-moving Wilfrid being given the run-around by the urchin children. Then he retumed to the cover of his simple lodge, erected in the comer of the site, and consulted his notes for the college. There was to be a mighty archway at the entrance, wrought from local yellow stone, and facing the street. He thought it a shame that its majesty would not be fully appreciated. You would need to stand far back to see its proportions properly, and the street was too narrow for that.

  His head began to fill with the beauty of the geometry that was the basis of all pleasing proportions. When he had first started learning the esoteric secrets of his trade - his mystery as he called it - he was awed by their simplicity. The ratio of a space obtained by taking the diagonal of a square and dropping it to the base line to create a rectangle was blinding in its beauty. Though creating that dimension was second nature to him, he was still dazzled by it. Engrossed, he set to working out the proportions of the church that was to stand in the college’s grounds. He thus failed to see the shadowy figure which lurked in the narrow passage opposite the building site, intent on observing every wall that fell to the workmen’s hammers.

  William Falconer also missed seeing the lurking presence.

  Returning from Master Richard Bonham’s lodgings near St Michael’s at North Gate, he might have turned down Shidyerd Street. It was the most direct route into the back lanes where his own lodgings stood. He had himself named the long, narrow hall he rented as Aristotle’s Hall, in honour of the philosopher whose works had first seduced him to study logic.

  In fact, his obsession with translating Aristotle’s original Greek texts and discovering the pure clarity of his thinking had also brought him to the other obsession that sometimes threatened to envelop his spare time. Murder deduction.

  It was Falconer’s conviction that logical thought could cut through the morass that surrounded cases of murder. He had long ago begun to poke his nose into mysterious deaths that took place in the town, and had proved his contention about the value of applying logic to the cases many times over. So he was perhaps a little disappointed that Sarah’s death was not going to offer him another chance. He was reluctant to admit it even to himself, but an untimely death usually quickened his mood when maybe it had slumped into the darkness of dull routine. But it was not to be this time. Self-murder was, by definition, a closed case, with victim and perpetrator housed in one body. Such a pity. He had been feeling quite low of late, and felt a need for something to stimulate his mind.

  Which is why it was a shame that, aware of the shambles that was being caused by the demolition of houses along Little Jewry. Falconer chose to walk the length of the High Street before turning down Logic Lane to complete a circuitous return to Aristotle’s Hall. Taking his usual route might have pitched him immediately into the mystery that was about to shock Oxford. As it was, his sullen mood caused him to dally around the stalls along the broad expanse of the High Street.

  Each shop was a bare six feet wide with a shutter that opened to double as a counter, so that the traders’ wares spilled out willy-nilly on to the street. Walking east from Bonham’s quarters first took Falconer past the goldsmiths, where the tinkling sound of craftsmen beating on metal emanated from inside the shops. Each stall offered its own carillon of bell-like sounds in a splendid cacophony of gilded noise. Further along sat the cross-legged tailors, mostly fashioning gowns and robes for those whose fancy, Falconer reckoned, ran to the gaudy. He had no urge for such display, conte
nting himself with one drab black gown that over the years had inclined to green around the edges. He also lingered little over the stalls of the purveyors of earthenware, gloves, white bread and dairy products. Instinctively, he sought out the little row of spicers that adorned the market like jewels. He loved this stretch of exotic stalls, where the mingling odours and bright colours evoked for him the years he had spent travelling the world.

  Not so much the great cities of the northern waterways that he was familiar with such as Paris, Bruges, Prague, Augsburg and Cracow. Through these had passed beeswax, tallow, furs and skins, and other such practical goods. No, the spices reminded him of the great southern ports he once knew like the back of his hand. Ports such as Naples, Barcelona and Marseilles, from which flowed cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and pepper. And here, in a few rare stalls in Oxford, he could once more imbibe the sweet and sharp aromas of these spices. They were prohibitively expensive, and so only available to the high and mighty of the district, and the upper echelons of the university hierarchy. But the scent of the exotics was free, and Falconer loved to raise his spirits with a trip past the spicers’ shops.

  Today, though, as he approached his goal with eager anticipation, he saw that even this pleasure was to be denied him.

  Standing at one of the spice stalls was a tall, elegant lady whose long blonde tresses glowed like spun gold in the early evening sun. Her long blue gown was draped over a figure at once slender and well rounded. She was to Falconer’s eyes both virgin and voluptuary, and he knew her well. But he dare not approach her, especially when her little familiar, of dimensions and appearance like a Barbary monkey, hovered so close.