A Killer in Winter

Richard Tulyet was a small man with a pale, fluffy beard that made him look like an adolescent. He was intelligent and well organised, and it had been a sad day for the town when he had announced his resignation from the office of Sheriff. His dissolute cousin Norbert was generally acknowledged to be the major factor in this calamity, and it had not earned the sullen youth any friends. It was widely believed that Norbert had deprived Cambridge of the best, fairest and most efficient Sheriff the town had ever had. Few believed that his replacement, Stephen Morice, could emulate him, and it had not been many weeks before people saw that Morice was worse than inefficient: he was corrupt, too.

Michael, particularly, missed Tulyet. Relations between town and University were invariably strained, and he had enjoyed working with a man whose priority was to create a city that was safe for everyone – scholars included. He had also appreciated the fact that Tulyet had not competed with him for authority, and was happy to let the University deal with its own miscreants. He mourned Tulyet’s resignation, and seldom allowed an opportunity to pass without pointing out that the town was less safe without Dick sitting in his office at the Castle.

Tulyet was waiting for them in St Michael’s Lane, where snow lay in shoulder-high drifts in places. To the left was the steeply gabled roof of Ovyng Hostel, while the tall stone walls of Michaelhouse stood to the right. Although Michaelhouse owned Ovyng, the hostel functioned as an independent institution with its own rules and regulations. It was not large, and its numbers had declined even further since the plague, but it boasted eight scholars – a principal, his assistant and six undergraduates – with two servants who cooked and cleaned. Five students, with Norbert being the exception, had taken vows with the Franciscan Order, and the hostel was reasonably well behaved by Cambridge standards – or at least Michael was not often obliged to visit it in his capacity of Senior Proctor.

‘It is a pity Norbert is – was – not more like his cousin,’ said Michael, as they made their way through the slush to where Tulyet and Nobert’s classmates waited in a disconsolate huddle near Ovyng’s main door.

‘Everyone thinks that,’ said Bartholomew. ‘When he came to live here, after the plague took his own family, his uncle immediately assumed he would inherit the family business, since Dick was intent on remaining Sheriff. But I suspect Norbert was never asked what he wanted.’

‘Norbert was a nuisance,’ said Michael unsympathetically. ‘He was on his final warning – one more night of drunken debauchery would have seen him banished from the University for ever. Still, it looks as though he will not be troubling us any more now.’

They reached the knot of people – Tulyet in his fine winter cloak, and the Franciscans shivering in their thin grey robes – and joined them in a wordless inspection of the body that lay, still partly buried, in a mound of snow near the door. Blood had flooded from an injury in the dead man’s back and spread like wings into the snow around him. Bartholomew saw that Tulyet was right to assume his cousin had been murdered: there was no way the man could have inflicted such a wound on himself.

‘Norbert might have remained covered until spring, if stray dogs had not sniffed him out,’ said Ovyng’s principal, Father Ailred, gesturing to several yellow mongrels that lurked hopefully nearby. As if the mangy beasts reminded him of his students, he turned and flapped large-knuckled hands at his flock, shooing them back inside the hostel. However, the death of a classmate was an interesting event, and Bartholomew noticed they did not go far. They hovered out of sight, but within earshot, on the other side of the door.

The physician turned his attention to Ailred. He had known the Franciscan for some years, and saw him almost daily, since Ovyng used St Michael’s Church for its offices, although neither had sought to develop the acquaintance beyond a nod and a polite word when their paths crossed. Ailred was tall, with an ugly, blunt face and a lot of yellowish white showing at the bottom of his eyes. His head was bald, except for a frizzy grey crescent that hugged the back of his skull. He had a reputation for sober, painstaking scholarship that was precise and rarely in error. Bartholomew also knew that he was from Lincoln, and that he never tired of making comparisons between his grand city and the squalor of Cambridge.

‘Norbert told me he was going to visit his uncle’s house,’ Ailred was saying, watching Tulyet nervously out of the corner of his eye as he addressed Michael. ‘When he did not return, I assumed he had found somewhere warmer and more comfortable than our hostel.’

‘When was this?’ asked Michael. ‘Last night?’