A Plague of Heretics by Bernard Knight

than his horrific injuries was lying alongside his outstretched right hand. Here a complete tongue and attached voice-box was carefully laid out on a bloody stone, like some piece of offal displayed on a butcher’s stall.
    De Wolfe stood silently for a moment, contemplating the awful sight. The two constables, though also hardened to blood and gore from dealing with hundreds of street fights and killings, looked rather white around the gills.
    ‘Never seen anything like this before, Crowner!’ ventured Osric.
    ‘Any idea who he is?’ demanded John.
    The constable shook his head. ‘Not until he’s cleaned up, anyway,’ he muttered. ‘You can’t see his features for blood.’
    Osric explained how a lad – or rather his dog – had found him about an hour ago and had run to the constable’s hut behind the Guildhall to raise the alarm. ‘But God knows how long he’s been lying here, as no one comes up this path, for it goes nowhere.’
    ‘Suggests that whoever did it knows his way around Exeter,’ said Gwyn. ‘He obviously knew of a place where it would be some time before it was discovered.’
    ‘And how long was that, I wonder?’ grunted the coroner ruminatively. He snapped off a piece of dead twig from a nearby bush and used it to prod the Adam’s apple. It was stuck fast to the flat stone by dried blood. ‘That’s been shed some long time ago, even allowing for the freezing weather.’
    Gwyn gave the thigh of the corpse a shove with the toe of his boot and the whole body moved as if carved from stone.
    ‘Stiff as a board!’ he commented. ‘But given this frost, it doesn’t help much to tell us when he died.’
    ‘You reckon he’s been here all night?’ asked Theobald, his podgy face starting to recover some colour.
    The coroner shrugged. ‘He’s been dead at least for many hours, I’m sure. But he might have been dead for days!’
    Gwyn had hunkered down alongside the cadaver and was studying the head.
    ‘Looks like a real nasty blow there. Shall I shift him so that you can see?’ he asked hopefully. The Cornishman always relished a bit of drama and mayhem.
    John waved a hand at the two constables. ‘One of you run around to St John’s,’ he commanded. ‘They’ve got that little mortuary behind the hospital, so ask them if they can send a couple of men with a bier to take him away.’
    As Theobald left to do his bidding, John instructed Osric to search the surrounding area to see if he could find any weapon.
    ‘If he’s had a crack on the head, there may be something lying around that caused it,’ he said, then dropped to his haunches opposite Gwyn and waited for his officer to lift up the head. The corpse was so rigid that it came up like a plank, but John was able to see the back of the head. Though obscured by a welter of blood, a deep laceration ran from above the left ear to the back point, above the nape of the neck. He motioned for his officer to lower the corpse to the ground and stood up, after wiping his soiled fingers on some weeds.
    ‘I suspect that’s what killed him,’ he growled.
    Gwyn nodded in agreement – he was always vying with his master over their expertise in matters of violent death.
    ‘All this blood has run down, but there’s no sign of spurting,’ he said, waving a hand at the surrounding vegetation. ‘I reckon he had his Adam’s apple cut out after he was dead.’
    Before he could enlarge on this macabre observation, there was a cry from down the path and Thomas came hurrying up.
    ‘I heard in the castle that you had been called up here. What’s going on?’ he demanded. Then his gaze fell on the dreadful apparition on the ground, and without warning the little clerk turned aside and was spectacularly sick against the nearest fence. After two years as the coroner’s scribe, he had largely overcome his sensitivity to the various forms of violent death, but the sight of a bloody tongue and voice-box laid out neatly on a flat stone was too much for