Grimacing with distaste, Buchan had assumed the mantle of responsibility for it and now beckoned Hal and Sim Craw to where the reeking remains lay on the slabbed floor. He spoke in slow, perfect English so that Sim Craw, whose French was poor, could understand.
‘White Tam has had a look but the most he can tell is that it is a year dead at least,’ Buchan had declared. ‘He says he is just a huntsman, but that yourself and Sim Craw are the very men for looking over bodies killed by violence. I am inclined to agree.’
Hal did not care for this unwelcomed skill handed to him by White Tam, nor did he want to be closeted with Buchan following the events of the hunt and the Auld Templar, but it appeared the earl was not put out at having his plans foiled by a wee lord from Lothian and a pair of splendid dogs. Hal had to admire the blithe dismissal of what would have been red murder if he had been allowed to succeed – but he did not want to be cheek by jowl with this man, who held a writ from the distant thunder that was King Edward to hunt out rebels in the north.
He thought to refuse the earl, using the excuse of not wanting to go near the festering remains, but he had seen Kirkpatrick’s face in the instant the effigy had been torn up by Bruce’s reins and in the long ride back. Now such a refusal was a blatant lie his curiosity undermined. Swallowing, driven by the desire of knowing, Hal had looked at Sim Craw, who had shrugged his padded shoulders in return.
‘A wise man wavers, a fool is fixed,’ he growled meaningfully, then sighed when he saw it made no difference, following Hal to the side of the thing, trying to breathe through his mouth to keep the stink out of his nose.
‘Christ be praised,’ Buchan said, putting a hand over his lower face.
‘For ever and ever,’ the other two intoned.
Then Sim poked his gauntleted hand in the ruin of it, peeled back something which could have been cloth or rotted flesh and pointed to a small mark on a patch of mottled blue-black.
‘Stabbed,’ he declared. ‘Upward. Thin-bladed dagger – look at the edges here. A wee fluted affair by the look. Straight to his heart and killit him dead.’
Hal and Sim looked at each other. It was an expert stroke from a particular weapon and only a man who killed with it regularly would keep a dagger like that about him. Wildly, Hal almost asked Buchan if he and Bruce had hunted in these woods before and had lost a henchman. He thought of the two deerhounds, slathered with balm and praises, and the dead alaunt, bitterly buried by the Berner.
‘So,’ Sim declared. ‘A particular slaying – what make ye of this, Hal? When the slayer was throwin’ him down, d’ye think?’
It was a cloth scrap, a few threads and patch no bigger than a fingernail, caught in the buckle of the dead man’s scrip baldric. It could have been from the man’s own cloak, or another part of his clothing for all the cloth was rotted and colour-drained, but Hal did not think so and said as much.
Sim thought and stroked the grizzle of his chin, disturbed a louse and chased it until he caught it in two fingers and flicked it casually away. He turned to Hal and Buchan, who was wishing he could leave the festering place but was determined, on his honour and duty as an earl of the realm, to stay as long as the others.
‘This is the way of it, I am thinking,’ Sim said. ‘A man yon poor soul knows comes to him, so getting near enough to strike. They are in the dark, ken, and neb to neb, which is secretive to me. Then the chiel with the dagger strikes . . .’
He mimicked the blow, then grabbed Hal by the front of his clothes and heaved him, as if throwing him over on to the ground. He was strong and Hal was taken by surprise, stumbled and was held up by Sim, who smiled triumphantly and nodded down to where the pair of them were locked, buckle to buckle, Sim’s leg between Hal’s two.
Hal staggered upright as Sim let go, then explained what had just happened to the bewildered Buchan, who had understood one in six words of Sim’s explanation in Lowland Lothian. Like wood popping in a fire, the earl thought.
‘Aye,’ Hal said at the end of it, ‘that would do it, right enough – well worked, Sim Craw.’
‘Which does not explain,’ Buchan said, ‘who this man is. He is no peasant with these clothes – Kirkpatrick said as much when he was here.’
‘Did he so?’ mused Sim, then looked closely at the dead man, half yellow bone, half black strips of rot, some cloth, some flesh. An insect scuttled from a sleeve, down over the knucklebones, slithering under a mottled leather pouch. Sim worried the pouch loose, trying to ignore the crack of the small bones and the waft of new rot that came with him disturbing the body. He opened it, shook the contents on to the palm of his hand and they peered. Silver coins, a lump of metal with horsehair string attached, a medallion stamped with the Virgin and Child.
‘No robbery, then,’ Hal declared, then frowned and indicated the brown, skeletal hand.
‘Yet a finger has been cut.’
‘To get at a tight-fitting ring,’ Sim said, with the air of man who was no stranger to it, and Buchan lifted an eyebrow at the revelation.
‘Yet no other rings are taken,’ he pointed out, and Hal sighed.
‘A wee cat’s cradle of clues, right enow,’ he declared, looking at the contents of the purse. The medallion was a common enough token, a pardoner’s stock in trade to ward off evil, but the teardrop metal lump and string was a puzzler.
‘Fishing?’ Buchan suggested hesitantly and Hal frowned; he did not know what it was but fishing seemed unlikely. Besides, it was knotted in regular progression and unravelled to at least the height of a man.
‘It is a plumb line,’ Sim said. ‘A mason uses it to mark where he wants stone cut – see, you chalk the string, hold the free end and let the weight dangle, then pluck it like a harp string to leave a chalk line on the stone.’
‘The knots?’
‘Measurement,’ Sim answered.
‘A mason?’ Buchan repeated, having picked that part out ‘Is this certes?’
Hal looked at Sim, eyebrows raised quizzically.
‘Am I certes? Is a wee dug bound by a blood puddin’?’ Sim answered indignantly. ‘I am Leadhoose born, up by the wee priory of St Machutus what the Tironensians live in. My father was lifted to work with the monks, who were God’s gift for buildin’.’
‘Tironensians. I know that order,’ Buchan said, recognising that word in the welter of thick-accented braid Scots. ‘They are strict Benedictines, finding glory in manual labour. They are skilled – did they not do the work at the abbeys in Selkirk, Arbroath and Kelso? You think this mason is a Benedictine from that place?’
‘Mayhap, though he is not clothed like any monk I ken,’ Sim declared. ‘But my da was lifted from the cartin’ to work with them at the quarrystanes and then came to Herdmanston to dig a well. Until I was of age to go off with young Hal here, I worked at the digging and the drystane. I ken a plumb line – the knots are measured in Roman feet.’
He closed his eyes, the better to remember.
‘Saint Augustine says six is the perfect number because the sum and product of its factors – one, two, and three – are the same. Thus a thirty-six-foot square is the divine perfection, much favoured by masons who build for the church. Christ be praised.’
He opened his eyes into the astounded stares of Hal and the Earl of Buchan and then blinked with embarrassment as they stumbled over the rote response, almost dumbed by the revelation of a Sim with numbers.
‘Aye, weel – tallyin’ is not my strength, though I ken the cost of a night’s drink. But my da dinned plumb lines into me, for ye can dig neither well nor build as much as a cruck hoose without it.’
‘You think it was a mason from St Machutus?’ the earl demanded, narrow eyed and cock-headed with trying to understand. Sim shook his head.
‘It’s