The Tinner's Corpse by Bernard Knight Page A

stream and his ragged cape blowing out behind him in the keen breeze. ‘Nothing to see up there, apart from a few sheep,’ he growled.
    De Wolfe sighed. This was going to be another unsolved murder, unless he could make someone talk at the inquest next day.
    ‘Let’s go, then. There are arrangements to be made back in the town.’ He strode towards the horses, waiting further down, their bridles held by the youngest of the apprentice tinners. ‘Bailiff, you stay and get that body carried down to the church. I’ll find my own way to the manor.’ Under his breath he added, ‘And I trust the lord of Chagford is more hospitable than many others who get saddled with the coroner’s company.’

CHAPTER THREE
In which Crowner John presides in a churchyard
    While the headless cadaver was being carried down from the edge of the moor on a makeshift bier of branches, Walter Knapman was having his evening meal at home in Chagford. He lived in the largest dwelling in the town, second only in size to the manor house just outside, where Hugh of Chagford, one of the Wibbery family, was the local lord.
    Knapman’s residence was quite new, built of red sandstone brought from further south, rather than the grey moorstone used for most other masonry. It was on the track into town from Great Weeke, sitting behind a garden, half-way up the hill that led to the church. Instead of a hall, which normally filled most of a house, it had two rooms, one at each side of the front door. A wooden staircase led up to a large room under the thatch, partitioned into a bedroom and a solar. The latter had a window set into the pine end, which – wonder of wonders – had six panes of glass. That was almost unique in Devon: even Exeter cathedral had no glazing. Walter had recently imported these thick slabs of glass from Germany, where much of his tin was sent. Though he claimed it was to make his new wife’s solar more comfortable, everyone in Chagford thought it was to blazon his importance and affluence. Certainly Knapman indulged Joan, a pretty woman fifteen years his junior: she was his second wife, the widow of a tanner from Ashburton, who had died of a fever.
    They sat now at meat, side by side at a square oaken table, with Joan’s mother Lucy opposite, next to the parish priest Paul Smithson, who had been invited to eat with them. Lucy, another widow, lived with them – part of the price Walter had reluctantly paid to persuade the delectable Joan to marry him five months earlier.
    Naturally the conversation centred on the death of Henry of Tunnaford, and most of the talking was between Knapman and the priest, though the older woman chipped in now and then, after listening avidly to every word. With the possible exception of the coroner’s clerk, Thomas, she was probably the most inquisitive person in Devon.
    Joan, whose dark hair peeped from her white linen cover-chief to frame an oval face with a look of the Madonna, said little and concentrated on eating the slivers of boiled fowl that her husband placed on the large trencher of bread that lay between them. As he talked, he leaned over and cut slices with his dagger from the carcass that sat on a wooden platter in the middle of the table. They had already demolished a large fish, and other bowls held fried onions, cabbage and turnips. Pottery mugs of ale and pewter wine cups sat before each of them. The household steward, a Saxon named Harold, fussed over them, replenishing their drink and relentlessly harrying the serving maid, who brought new dishes from the kitchen in the backyard.
    ‘What does Hugh Wibbery think of all this?’ rasped the priest, through a mouthful of fowl’s leg. He was a fleshy man, with a pallid face, from which two black button eyes peered out over flabby cheeks. Although he was not a monk, he was tonsured, but curiously with the Celtic type: he had shaved a broad band from his forehead over the crown to the nape of his neck.
    ‘He seems to lack any interest in