For the Love of Old Bones - and other stories (Templar Series) Read Free Page A

being a slut, well . . . I saw the way she walked in here, like it took all her remaining courage just to enter. She daren’t even shoot the merest look at the men in here, for fear of bursting into tears, just strode up to me and kept her eyes on me, the poor thing. There was nothing brazen about it.’
    ‘Did she wear a purse?’
    ‘No, not that I saw, Sir Baldwin. That was why she came here, I think, because she had no money on her to take a room in a better house. I took pity on her and said she could use one, and a meal, for the sake of St Boniface.’
    ‘Did she take a room?’
    ‘Yes. The small one behind the hall. It’s near my own chamber, and I thought I could protect her if anyone got amorous overnight. But she left before anything happened.’
    ‘When was this?’
    ‘Just as night fell. Before the church bell for the last service.’
    Sir Baldwin nodded and thanked him, then stood abruptly and walked out. I found him with his hands hooked in his belt, leaning against a hitching post and glowering at the view.
    ‘I know how you feel, Sir Baldwin. It’s awful if she truly was a respectable woman, having to beg for a room in a place like this.’
    ‘Hmm?’ He gazed at me for a moment as if he didn’t recognise me at all. Then a slow smile began to spread over his features. ‘Oh, I see. No, I was just thinking that she must have come from that direction, from the east; if Ralph was right and she came past him, she must have been coming from that way.’
    ‘So what? Does it really matter?’
    ‘Perhaps not, Sir Eustace. But it means that she was walking in the wrong direction for Exeter. If she was some girl who had been running away from home, or, to take your example, if she was a whore looking for a new patch to work, she’d surely have been going the other way. No, she came here for a specific reason.’
    ‘We’re unlikely to discover what it might have been, though.’ To be honest, I was finding his continual inferencing to be more than a little irritating. I was a Coroner, and had better things to do than stand in the street getting hot and dust-blown by passing traffic while my companion guessed at a range of different motives and explanations for how someone he had never known might behave.
    ‘There is one thing that surprises me,’ he muttered, this time peering over his shoulder westwards, towards the inn. ‘Why should she come to town without money? Is it possible she was robbed on her way here? Or did she have some other reason to come here instead of staying in a decent, clean inn?’
    ‘Who knows?’
    ‘Let’s go to the inn and ask Paul.’

    If possible the innkeeper looked even more fretful and anxious than he had the night before. He had few enough customers this early, only a small number of tranters and hawkers and a couple of my own men, but insisted on calling his servants and ordering them about for some time as if demonstrating that he had much to do and couldn’t spare a few minutes in idle chatter. Of course, that is often the way of men who are confronted by their Coroner. Our post is so important that it can cause the foolish to lose their tongues, so I didn’t look upon his behaviour as suspicious. I merely waited, casting an interested eye over the women he had in there.
    One was a real beauty: fair-headed, well-built under her tunic, from the look of her swelling chest, with a bawdy, excitable look in her bright green eyes. I made a mental note to return to see her when this silly affair was over.  
    When I cast a sidelong glance at Sir Baldwin, I was surprised to see him lounging and staring up at the ceiling. If I had to guess, I’d say he hadn’t noticed the aproned idiot’s play-acting. Sir Baldwin sat patiently until the innkeeper was ready, and then the stupid serf stood in front of us, asking in his whining, troubled voice whether we wanted a drink.  
    By this time I was hungry, and demanded a fresh meat pie. Baldwin seemed astonished by my desire for