Free The Tainted Relic by Michael Jecks, The Medieval Murderers

the other inn, there were few other lodgers and, oblivious to the snores of two other drunken patrons in the corner, he soon slipped into a deep sleep, from which he was never to awaken.
     
     
    A couple of hours after dawn the next day, Lucy, one of the two serving maids at the Bush, climbed up the wide ladder at the back of the taproom, clutching a leather bucket of water and a birch broom. Her morning task was to clean up the loft after the overnight lodgers had left–all too often, those who had drunk too much had thrown up their ale over the floor or their pallets.
    This morning, however, it was a different-coloured fluid that required scouring from the bare boards. As soon as Lucy reached the top of the ladder and started to move among the dozen rough mattresses laid out on the floor, she gave a piercing shriek that brought the landlady Nesta and her old potman Edwin running to the foot of the ladder, together with one or two patrons who had been eating an early breakfast.
    ‘That priest that came last night!’ wailed Lucy from the top. ‘He’s had his throat cut!’
    Edwin, a veteran of the Irish wars in which he lost one eye and half a foot, stumbled up the ladder to confirm the maid’s claim, and a moment later he reappeared beside Lucy.
    ‘She’s right enough, mistress! I’d better go for the crowner straight away!’
    Within half an hour, Sir John de Wolfe and his officer and clerk had arrived on the scene, any problem at the Bush being a great spur to their keenness to attend. Before climbing the ladder, John slipped an arm around Nesta’s slim waist and looked down anxiously at her. At twenty-eight, she was still attractive, with a trim figure and a heart-shaped face crowned with a mass of chestnut hair.
    ‘Are you very upset, my love?’ he murmured in the Welsh that they used together.
    His mistress was made of sufficiently stern stuff not to be shocked by a dead body.
    ‘I’m upset for the reputation of my inn!’ she replied pertly. ‘It’s not good for business to have customers murdered in my beds.’
    She had experienced an occasional death in the tavern, always the result of some drunken brawl, but to find a guest lying on his pallet with his throat cut was an unwelcome novelty.
    ‘Let’s see what this is about, Gwyn,’ snapped the coroner, leading the way up the ladder, at the top of which Edwin awaited them. With Gwyn close behind and Thomas de Peyne a reluctant third, he trooped across the wide floor of the loft. Apart from one remaining lodger, who had drunk so much the previous night that he was still snoring in a far corner, the high, dusty loft was empty. Two rows of crude mattresses lay on the bare boards, the farthest one in the second line occupied by the corpse. The place was poorly lit, as there was no window opening in the great expanse of thatch above them, but a little light filtered up from the eaves and through the wide opening where the ladder entered. Edwin had had the forethought to light a horn lantern, and by its feeble light de Wolfe bent to examine the dead man.
    A great gash extended from under his left ear across to the right side of his neck below the jaw, exposing muscles and gristle. A welter of dark blood soaked his ragged shirt and the blanket, running down into the straw of the palliasse, and there was a patch of dried pink froth over the centre of his neck.
    ‘A single cut, right through his windpipe,’ observed Gwyn, with the satisfied air of a connoisseur of fatal injuries. ‘No trial cuts either–so he didn’t do it himself.’
    ‘Hardly likely to be a suicide, if there’s no knife here!’ sneered Thomas sarcastically, always keen to embarrass his Cornish colleague. He pointed to the crown of the dead man’s head, where bristly tufts of hair remained on the bared scalp, together with some small scratches. ‘That’s a strange-looking tonsure, master. Freshly made with a very poor knife.’
    John had to agree with him, but saw no particular