Crowner Royal (Crowner John Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF Page A

the man lying on the boards here.’
    He gave a description that was as unhelpful as Gwyn’s, but added a small piece of information. ‘I saw a wherry a few yards off the pier, obviously going away after having landed someone. He was well beyond hailing distance by the time I got here.’
    The Thames wherries were almost as common as seagulls – flimsy craft with one oarsman, who plied their trade on a populous stretch of water, which had only one bridge, two miles downriver.
    The clerks and monks looked anxious to go about their business, so John dismissed them, warning them that they might be required to attend an inquest. Thomas quietly reminded his master that this might be difficult with no body.
    ‘Strictly speaking, sir, we don’t even know if he is dead! He might have revived and crawled out further down the riverbank.’
    Gwyn gave an explosive snort of derision. ‘Of course he’s bloody dead! Half his lifeblood is on the timbers here and then his head was sunk under this brown shit that passes for London river water!’
    De Wolfe turned to leave, telling the guard to get someone with a bucket to swill away the blood from the planks of the jetty.
    ‘We must find someone who can tell us who the dead man was,’ he growled. ‘He might have a family to mourn him.’
    Though the victim was apparently in holy orders, most of these were in the lower grades and were not necessarily celibate like ordained priests. They were all, however, able to claim the protection of the Church through its ‘benefit of clergy’ when it came to a conflict with the secular powers.
    Thomas pattered along behind the two bigger men as they left the landing stage, the old phthisis of the hip that had afflicted him as a child giving him a slight limp. ‘How will you discover who he might be, Crowner?’ he asked. ‘This place must have a couple of hundred people living and working in it.’
    ‘Ask the damned Steward, I suppose, if those clerks reckoned he was one of his staff,’ John replied abruptly.
    They went back into the palace through the main entrance behind the Great Hall, the two helmeted sentries saluting de Wolfe as he marched towards the doorward’s chamber just inside. Here a fat clerk sat behind a table, talking to a sergeant of the guard. This was a tall man with three golden lions passant guardant , the royal arms of Richard Coeur de Lion embroidered across the chest of his long grey tunic. The soldier recognised John – in fact, he remembered him from Palestine where Black John’s prowess in the Crusade was almost legendary. As soon as the coroner had explained the problem, the sergeant insisted on personally conducting de Wolfe to the Steward’s domain and set off ahead of the trio into the bowels of the palace, which to them was uncharted territory.
    After a number of twists and turns, all on the ground floor, they came to a wide passageway, on one side of which were kitchens, full of smoke, steam, raucous voices and the clatter of pots. Opposite were storerooms, with men trundling baskets, sacks and barrels from a wide door leading to a carter’s yard at the rear.
    ‘One of the Steward’s top men lives in here, Sir John,’ declared the sergeant, going to a doorless arch between two of the stores. He waved de Wolfe inside, then excused himself and strode away. John saw a cluttered room, with two desks occupied by young clerks wrestling with lists on parchment and piles of notched wooden tallies. Between them, on a slightly raised platform, was a sloped writing desk like a lectern. Behind this stood a thin, austere-looking man of late middle age, dressed in an expensive but sombre tunic that reached down to his ankles. Unlike John’s collar-length black hair, the man’s greying thatch was shaved up to a horizontal line around his head, in the typical Norman fashion. He stared haughtily at the visitor and enquired as to his business.
    ‘I am Sir John de Wolfe, the king’s coroner,’ snapped John, who