Hugh Corbett 06 - Murder Wears a Cowl Read Online Free PDF Page B

dirty-faced urchin she paid a penny to, to watch the door, grinned and waved.
    ‘No strangers here, Mistress!’ he called out.
    Agnes smiled and the boy wondered what was wrong for the whore’s face wasn’t painted. He could not understand why she kept hidden in her chamber, paying him money to warn her of any strangers approaching the house. The boy watched her go then hawked and spat. Whatever was wrong, he hoped Agnes Redheard would not discover he had failed to deliver her message at Westminster. Instead, he had dropped the paper into a sewer and spent the penny she gave him on a basket of plums covered in sugar.
    Meanwhile, Agnes slipped through the streets, brushing past white-eyed beggars who whined for alms, and a cripple on wooden slats who cried out that he had seen the devil in Smithfield – but no one listened. The booths were open, under the projecting stories of the great houses, and leather-clad apprentices screamed that they had hot mutton, spiced beef and soft bread for sale. Agnes caught the savoury smells from the cookshops and her stomach clenched with hunger. On one occasion she felt so giddy she had to stop and lean against a doorway, watching an old woman at the corner of the alleyway hitch her skirts and squat to pee. The old woman caught Agnes’s eyes and she cackled with laughter in a display of reddened gums and yellow, rotted teeth. Agnes looked away hurriedly, clenched her fists and ran on.
    She followed the line of the city ditch, full of offal and refuse, the dead bodies of cats and dogs now ripening under a strong, summer sun. She turned right, down Aldersgate Street into St Martin’s Lane then through alleyways which would take her to Greyfriars. She stopped at a crossroads where the Bailiff of the Ward had piled high on a stool the goods stolen by a burglar now on his way to the scaffold at Tyburn. Different people claimed the same objects and a violent row ensued, blocking all paths. Agnes stopped; she hadn’t the strength to push through. A costermonger came alongside her with a little handcart full of bread, chunks of cheese and cooked eels. Agnes’s hand reached out; she needed to eat, she had to chew something. Suddenly a small urchin threw the dead, bloated body of a toad into the cart. The costermonger picked it up and threw it back, screaming abuse, and Agnes seized her chance. She picked up a small, hard loaf of rye bread, a chunk of cheese and, seeing a gap in the crowd, slipped through, down a narrow, fetid alleyway. Turning left, she saw the small church before her. Agnes, her mouth full of bread and cheese, could have cried with pleasure. She was here, she was safe. She went up the crumbling steps and slipped through a darkened doorway. The message pushed under her garret door had been quite simple: she was to go to the church just before the Angelus bell and wait until her benefactor arrived.
    She crouched at the foot of a pillar and pushed the rest of the bread and cheese into her mouth, chewing the last morsel slowly, enjoying the juices the food started in both mouth and stomach. She felt stronger but, oh, so tired. Her eyes were closing when she heard the whispered voice.
    ‘Agnes! Agnes!’
    The girl stood up, peering into the darkness.
    ‘Where are you?’ she called.
    No answer. The girl, frightened now, backed against the pillar. She thought if she stayed there, she would be safe.
    ‘Please!’ she called. ‘What is the matter?’
    She edged round the pillar, her face twisted sideways and her neck exposed: so vulnerable. The murderer on the other side of the pillar killed Agnes Redheard with one slash of a cut-throat knife. Agnes, eyes open, staring with terror, slumped to the hard, paved stone floor as the killer crushed the waxen image into a ball and pushed it up a voluminous sleeve. For a few seconds the killer stood over the girl’s body.
    ‘Goodbye, Agnes,’ the voice whispered. ‘You may have seen me but didn’t you know I also glimpsed