Revelation

Gib looked sombre. 'Wilf was inside on the floor, tied up, dead. He was gagged. They said his staring eyes were terrible to see. Someone had cut him badly all over, then tied him up. His thigh had this great sore on it, all black and crawling with maggots. There was a rag in his mouth to stop him shouting. Whether his diseased leg got him, or cold and hunger, nobody knows.'

We were silent. This death was even worse than Roger's. Tupholme would have died in slow agony.

'If his leg went bad that would probably kill him first,' Barak said.

'Welsh Elizabeth deserves to hang,' Gib said with sudden fierceness.

I looked at Barak and he shook his head slightly. Horrific as this killing was, its manner was nothing like those of Roger and Dr Gurney.

Gib led us up a side-path to where an isolated cottage stood, as poor as the others. No smoke came from the roof. The shutters were closed, and the door had a heavy padlock. The wood of one shutter had been splintered at one end where the neighbour had broken in. Gib stared at the house, then quickly crossed himself. 'I'll get the key,' he said. 'Gib's neighbour has it. I won't be long.'

He walked back to the main path, the reeds soon hiding him. I looked at the cultivated land around the cottage. It was already going to seed, new grass coming up among the little furrows.

'This is a dead end,' Barak said.

'It seems so. And yet. . .'

'What?'

'Gib described a great sore. I know that phrase, or one like it. People keep using phrases that I know somehow. Treasurer Rowland talked of a fountain of blood. The man who found Dr Gurney said something too — water turned to blood.'

'We've got enough to worry about without word mysteries,' Barak said irritably. 'Look, when he comes back, let's just say we don't need to go inside; it seems clear enough this Welsh whore did it for spite.'

'That's a huge amount of spite.'

Gib returned in a few minutes. 'Pete Lammas has given me the key, the coroner left him responsible for the house. He doesn't want to go in again, though.' He paused. 'Look, sir,' he said. 'I'd rather not go in either. I've heard enough of what it was like. Can I leave you to bring me back the key?'

'All right,' I agreed.

Gib handed the key to Barak, bowed to us and left. I was still lost in thought, those phrases jostling in my head.

'I'll be the one to open the door, then, shall I?' Barak asked with heavy sarcasm. He unlocked the padlock and pushed at the door. It was stiff, scraping along the ground as it opened. Barak and I both stepped backwards at the smell that hit us, a butcher's shop stink overlaid with the stench of sweat and dirt. And a great buzzing, as from a swarm of flies.

'Jesu!' Barak said.

We stepped carefully into the dark interior. I saw the shapes of chairs, a table and what looked like heaps of rubbish scattered around. Despite the season blowflies were everywhere, buzzing around the room, slow and disoriented in the cool weather. We batted them away from our faces. The earthen floor was spotted with dead ones. Barak went across to the shutters and opened them.

In the light that fell into the room we saw the place was filthy, stinking old rushes on the floor, a full chamber pot in one corner and rags everywhere. The disturbed blowflies began to settle again, on the rags and the pot; a few flew out of the window.

'Gib said his leg was a mass of maggots,' Barak said. 'They must have hatched. There's enough filth in here for them to feed on.' He lifted one of the rags with his foot, and a couple of flies buzzed upward. 'This is his upper hose, I think. There's a tear in it, look, it's stiff with dried blood. Jesus, to cut someone up and leave them to die of infected wounds. That's some revenge.'

I stood in the middle of the foul room, looking round. 'The coroners' men probably cut the clothes off the body and then left everything here as it was,' I said. 'Look, there are some fragments of cut rope over there.'

'It must have been filthy enough here even before the poor arsehole was killed.'

I looked at a truckle bed in the corner, the sheets grey with dirt. A cheap wooden cross was nailed to the mud wall above the bed. A relic of the man's hot-gospelling past?

'Let's get out of here,' Barak said. 'There's nothing but filth and rags.'

'Not yet.' I would have liked to sit down, my back was aching from so long on my feet. 'This is a lonely spot and he was unpopular. If Wilf Tupholme's killer knew him, he would know that in the depths of winter if he was tied up and left to die it might be weeks before anyone opened the place up.'

'Why do you say, he? Surely it was his woman.'

'I wonder.' I looked at a dark bloodstain on the floor by the long-dead fire. 'He was overpowered, perhaps knocked out, then tied up, a rag put in his mouth, then laid down here. Finally his leg was slashed open. Surely a drunken whore he'd kicked out would be more likely to knock him on the head.'

'She wanted to ensure a slow death,' Barak answered grimly.

'And if it wasn't her?'

'Who else could it have been?'