Free Hugh Corbett 12 - The Treason of the Ghosts by Paul Doherty Page B

felt as if he was going down a hollow, darkened passageway. The lane rose, dipped, then rose again. Corbett identified Devil’s Oak before Tressilyian pointed it out: a great, squat tree once used as a boundary mark. The huge oak had been struck by lightning but its branches, now stripped of their leaves, still stretched up to the evening sky. Corbett dismounted. He looked across the fields to his left: a water meadow which ran down to the banks of the Swaile. Corbett glimpsed the tumbled ruins just near its bank.
    ‘What’s that?’ he asked.
    ‘Beauchamp Place,’ Chapeleys explained. ‘It was once a small manor house: piggeries, dovecotes, stables, but the man who built it was a fool. The land is waterlogged. After heavy rains it tends to flood. It’s been a ruin for about thirty years now. The last relic of the Beauchamps was a madcap old man, found drowned in one of the cellars. The townspeople still say it’s haunted.’ He pointed to the oak. ‘They say the same about this and poor Elizabeth’s ghost.’
    Corbett stepped across the ditch. There was a gap in the hedgerow on either side of the oak. Corbett slipped through one of these.
    ‘Elizabeth’s corpse was found here?’
    ‘Yes,’ Chapeleys replied. ‘That’s what Blidscote said, to the right of the great oak tree, on the field side of the hedgerow.’
    Corbett squatted down. The grass was cold, catching at the sweaty skin on his wrist. He brushed this aside and looked along the hard, gnarled branches of the hedge but could see nothing amiss. Feeling with his gloved hand, he searched the area carefully, digging with his fingers.
    ‘What are you looking for?’ Tressilyian asked.
    Corbett got to his feet. Tressilyian was leaning against the oak tree, Chapeleys on the far side of the ditch. Corbett repressed the feeling of unease at the atmosphere of danger. He did not like Devil’s Oak. Here he was with two strangers in a place of brutal murder. He half wished Ranulf was with him.
    ‘Why is it,’ Corbett murmured, ‘such places have a feeling of desolation? Is it the imaginings of our own souls, a lack of wit? Or does a spot like this still reek of the terrors which visited it?’
    Corbett brushed past Tressilyian and leapt across the ditch. He took the reins of his horse, stroking its muzzle.
    ‘What were you looking for?’ Tressilyian asked again.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Corbett replied. ‘I am curious. Why should a young woman like Elizabeth come to a lonely place like this? She wouldn’t, would she? No woman in her right mind would travel so far from her town to meet a man in the open countryside.’
    ‘Are you saying she was killed elsewhere?’ Chapeleys asked.
    ‘I know she was killed elsewhere,’ Corbett replied. ‘You see, when those two young boys found her corpse they would be frightened, yes? They’d run back to the town and bring back Master Blidscote and the other bailiffs. Now they would see it lying there and pull it out ever so carefully.’
    ‘And?’ Sir Maurice asked, intrigued by this dark-faced, mysterious clerk.
    ‘The man who raped young Elizabeth wouldn’t be so tender. He was brutal. He attacked her, ravished her, then wrung her neck with a garrotte string. Even a man like Blidscote, despite all the ale he had drunk, would have seen signs of a violent attack here at Devil’s Oak.’ He paused. ‘I also expected to find bits of hair, clothing, even some sign of the corpse being pushed under the hedge. Again, Blidscote would have noticed that. But the killer seems to have acted as tenderly as a mother with her babe.’
    ‘You don’t believe that?’ Tressilyian taunted.
    ‘No, I don’t.’
    Corbett stared across the field and his heart skipped a beat. Was that a figure of a woman - he was sure of it - flitting through the copse of trees on the brow of the hill?
    ‘Sir Hugh, you were talking about the killer . . .?’
    ‘I don’t think he was tender,’ Corbett replied, still watching the spot through the