The Hand of Justice

‘Damn!’ muttered Michael. ‘I had hoped to discover that for myself, to impress her with my insightful analysis of facts. Did you know she deduced Quenhyth was the killer before you did? She had pieced the mystery together from conversations with Bess and Redmeadow. We made mistakes, Matt. We should not have dismissed Bess as a rambling lunatic, and I should not have assumed that Bottisham and Deschalers’s deaths were connected to the mill dispute. That led us badly astray. Of course she did not make such a basic error of judgement.’

‘And what did she plan to do about Quenhyth?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘Stab him during mass? Poison him at his lessons?’

‘She planned to inform me about him,’ said Michael sharply. ‘And let justice take its course, on the understanding that the King would not be so free with his pardons in the future. But tell me what she fathomed about Quenhyth’s escape.’

‘Come with me,’ said Bartholomew.

Wreckage from Mortimer’s Mill was still bobbing and swirling in the river, and it meant the King’s Mill could not operate that day. The Millers’ Society did not want to make expensive repairs because charred wood was entangled in their waterwheel, so it had been hauled clear of the water that surged below it. Bernarde’s slow-witted son had opened the building, ready to accept grain for future grinding, but the apprentices had been given an unexpected day off. The lad nodded a greeting to Bartholomew and Michael as they entered his dead father’s domain, but made no move to follow them inside, or even to ask what they were doing.

‘She says there is a pit near the waterwheel that allows routine maintenance to be carried out,’ said Bartholomew, walking to the far end of the building. ‘This allows the wheel to be inspected while it is turning, so you do not have to shut the whole thing down every time it needs a little grease. Dame Pelagia believes Quenhyth hid in it after the murders, and waited until the mill was deserted again before escaping.’

‘But that means he was here while we inspected the bodies,’ said Michael, aghast.

‘That is what she says. No wonder he was so well acquainted with the details of our investigation the day after — he knew Edward Mortimer was on our list of suspects, for example.’

‘God’s blood!’ breathed Michael. ‘That is a sobering thought! I should have considered the possibility that Bernarde did not see the killer because the killer was still here. That was another mistake we made: Bernarde forgot to mention this pit, and we took his word that there was nowhere for a killer to hide.’

‘It is easy to say that now,’ said Bartholomew. ‘But you had just discovered the mutilated corpses of two men you knew — one of whom you liked. You should not be too hard on yourself.’

‘She does not make stupid errors,’ said Michael bitterly. ‘How can I ever hope to attain her standards when I am so careless?’

Bartholomew peered into the pit, which was exactly where Dame Pelagia had said it would be, then jumped back in alarm. He gazed at Michael in disbelief, then leaned forward to look again, to be sure that what he had seen was really there.

‘Do not emulate her too closely, Brother,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I have just discovered Thorpe and Mortimer, both dead from knife wounds. There can only be one person who killed them, and who chose such an appropriate hiding place for their bodies until she was safely away.’

‘No, Matt,’ said Michael, manoeuvring himself into a position where he could see the corpses for himself. ‘My grandmother had nothing to do with their deaths — they killed each other. They are both holding daggers, and you can see the dust all over their clothes from where they struggled with one another. Look at Thorpe’s hand — he is even holding a tuft of Mortimer’s hair, ripped out during the fracas.’

Bartholomew saw he was right. ‘And part of the floor is broken here, suggesting that it crumbled under them as they fought, and toppled them down into the pit.’ He measured the stab wounds against the widths of the blades, and found they matched precisely.

‘It was a case of a falling out among thieves,’ said Michael. ‘Perhaps they quarrelled over the gold they stole from Lavenham. Or perhaps their murderous inclinations simply boiled to the surface and they were obliged to relieve them on each other.’

Bartholomew supposed he was right. There was certainly no evidence to suggest anything else had happened. ‘Then where is Lavenham’s gold?’ he asked. ‘It should be here.’

But the box of coins was nowhere to be found, and there was something rather too neat about the pair in their pit and their conveniently simultaneous deaths. Bartholomew glanced at Michael, and saw he was not the only one troubled by the tidy conclusion to the case.

‘Do you think …?’ began the physician uncertainly.

‘I do not think anything,’ replied Michael softly. ‘And neither should you.’