The Sticklepath Strangler Read online

‘Come out and we’ll send you to Exeter to be tried by the justice of Gaol Delivery. Otherwise we will kill you. We have to.’ It almost sounded as though the man was pleading. ‘We’ve found her. We know what you did to her. We’ve heard of your… your meal!’

  A shot of pain lanced his back, and the breath hissed through his teeth. He had no idea what the reeve was talking about, didn’t care especially. A moment later he caught sight of the man, a tall, powerfully built figure standing a little distance from the beech tree, roughly where Athelhard had pulled the arrow from his thigh.

  He could feel his strength ebbing, but he was determined, and lifted his bow. Every week he had practised with his bow since his youth, and now he had a clear picture of his enemy. Raising the bow until the point of his arrow was on the man’s face, Athelhard drew back the string.

  Normally he could pull it back smoothly, the arrow resting on his knuckle while his hooked fingers drew the string back to reach his face, softly touching his nose, lips and chin, while he stared along the arrow itself, waiting for the moment to release it. Not today. He couldn’t hold it steady, even when the string was only halfway drawn. Hauling back on it, he kept his eye on the man, gasping with the effort, but before the arrow’s nock was six inches from his chin, his arm began vibrating madly. The bow wavered impossibly; his hands couldn’t control it. The pull was too strong for him in his weakened state. Blood flooded from his wound, slick on his skin, glueing his shirt to his back. He couldn’t aim, couldn’t even be sure he’d get the thing to fire through the doorway – it would be more likely to strike the wall at this rate. Slowly, he permitted the string to inch forward without firing, then sagged, silently weeping, his chin falling to his breast after the expenditure of so much effort. There was nothing left. He was done.

  That was when he noticed the light playing about the doorway, saw the torches. Instinctively he glanced up at the thatching of his roof.

  There was an odd noise, like a pheasant in flight, and he wondered for a moment what it might be. He realised when he heard it thud against his roof that it was a torch. After so much rain, it had little immediate effect, producing a loud spitting and fizzing, but then he heard another thump above him, and a third. Soon he could hear a loud hissing and crackling as the thatch began to ignite.

  It was enough. As the flames took hold, the fight left him. He had no more energy. The vital force which had directed him was fading as his blood dripped steadily to pool on the floor. With it, his urgent need for revenge was dwindling and in its place an overwhelming lassitude settled upon him. He fell back onto his stool even as the first whiff of burning thatch reached his nostrils, as the first glowing strands fell at his feet.

  Resigned to death, he preferred to be consumed in the flames that devoured his cottage. Rather that than give his enemies the satisfaction of seeing him bolt from his door like a rabbit chased by a ferret, only to be shot and killed. He would have been pleased to die fighting, but it was too late. As the smoke began to fill his room with a greenish, yellow vapour, he inhaled deeply, welcoming the light-headedness that proclaimed the onset of oblivion.

  The scream stirred him: Margaret, his responsibility, his sister.

  Her despair made him sit up, coughing painfully. In her voice he could hear her terror. She was too simple to comprehend what was happening, probably didn’t know her only brother was inside, but seeing her cottage in flames made her give shriek after shriek.

  ‘Go on! Throw her in with him!’ he heard someone shout, and that was enough to galvanise him.

  ‘NO!’ he roared, stumbling to his feet. She cried out again, and he felt the fury take him over. Gripping his useless bow in both hands and leaning heavily on it like a staff, he limped to the door, then lurched on outside shouting for his Meg. It was there, before his threshold, that the three arrows found their marks.

  One smashed straight into his shoulder, the heavy arrowhead spinning him around, making him drop his bow and stumble to the ground. He had just propped himself up on his good arm to face his tormentors when the second arrow flashed into his neck and flew through it, thudding on into the cottage wall. He coughed once, and even as he drew breath to cough again, the last arrow slammed into the left side of his breast, straight into his heart.

  Just before he died, Athelhard used his remaining strength to scream one last defiant curse. All the men heard him; all would remember it for the rest of their lives.

  ‘Damn you! Damn you all! I’ll see the whole vill roast in hell! You are all accursed!’

  * * *

  Later, much later, Serlo the Warrener walked down into the clearing. He took in the smoking shell of the house and eyed the smouldering corpse which lay just inside the doorway where the departing men had thrown it, to be consumed by the flames.

  A dead body was nothing to Serlo; he had handled enough of them in his time, although he had never burned one. That looked wrong. It was one thing to bury a man after listening to his confession, letting him answer the questions of the viaticum and giving him absolution, but to slaughter a man like this was repellent.

  He shrugged and turned away; a man of few words has little need of contemplation, and for the present he had one pressing consideration.

  The girl knelt not far from the wreck of her house, her eyes wild, her mouth dribbling. Her round face was enough to show that her mind was addled, and it was that which saved her, of course. Serlo knew that the superstitious folk of the vill wouldn’t harm a girl like her. She was touched.

  He gently crouched before her, blocking her view of her brother’s corpse, and clasped her hands in his. It took a long time, much talking, a lot of reassuring and comforting, but at last, as the dawn lighted the eastern horizon, she complied with his gentle urging and went with him up to his house.

  Chapter One

  Seven years later

  Joan bolted up the track as though the hounds of hell were snapping at her heels. Splashing through the ruts and puddles, she could feel the mud spattering her calves and thighs underneath her skirts, the brambles catching at her sleeves.

  Gasping, she paused at the top of the steepest part of the hill, gripping her sides and facing back the way she had come. There, far below her, she could see her red-faced friend Emma panting and waving up at her. Soon Emma had recovered and set off again, pressing her palms on her thighs with each step as though it could ease her progress.

  Emma was too chubby, that was why she struggled to keep up with Joan, not that either minded. Joan was fond of her friend, and Emma was devoted to Joan. There were few other girls in the area and although with Joan’s fertile imagination she could populate the surrounding ten miles with different inhabitants, it was nice not to have to bother, and Emma had a similar sense of fun to her own. She was a good companion.

  It was terribly steep here – Joan could recall her father telling her that ‘stickle’ meant steep – but now that they had climbed the sharper incline at the bottom of Greenhill, the slope rose less cruelly, taking them through the trees to the scrubby land above the vill.

  From here she could see right over the clump of small cottages and the reeve’s own larger house, to the river and then the hill which stood between Sticklepath and South Zeal.

  She loved this view. Below her she could just glimpse her own family’s home, a large cottage at the edge of the vill under the hill that led up to the moors, a good-sized house for her and her parents. Behind was the mill, whose crunching and rumbling could be heard even over the steady rushing of the river. A short distance away was the chapel, sitting in the broad loop where the river curled around the bottom of the hill’s slope with, beside it, the small cemetery with its twin defences: the hurdles enclosing it to protect the dead from scavenging dogs and wild animals, while their souls were protected from demons by the single large wooden cross planted like a tree in the middle.

  After that stood the inn, always filled with travellers. Sticklepath lay on the main road between Exeter and Cornwall, and pilgrims
, merchants, fish-sellers and tranters of all kinds passed by here. Even now Joan could see a man leading a packhorse down the slope from South Zeal. He followed the muddy trail to the ford and stood there contemplating it, then ran across quickly, feet splashing the water in all directions. At the far side he turned, but his horse hadn’t followed him, and it stood for a moment, watching him with a kind of bemused surprise before wandering to the verge and nibbling at the grass. The man’s angry voice couldn’t reach Joan over the rumble and clatter of the mill, but she smiled to see him raise his fists in impotent fury before recrossing the river to fetch the beast.

  The men and most of the women were outside, working, their legs stained brown from the mud in the narrow strips in the communal fields. Each little half-acre strip was separated by an unploughed, grassy path called a landsherd, and the women were bending to pull out the straggling fingers of couch grass before they could invade and establish themselves in the strips and threaten the new crop of oats.

  It was a peaceful, comforting scene. Joan knew enough about poverty. It was hard not to, when everyone was struggling to make a living, when neighbours could scarcely find the money for grain to make bread and had to depend on the largesse of their lord, Hugh de Courtenay, whose serfs they were. Still, none of that could detract from the warmth she felt, surveying this serene little vill. It was her home.

  As she gazed down she could feel her heart swell. The picture before her represented safety and comradeship; it contained all she knew of life and love. She had no idea of the trials which would soon afflict her and her family – those troubles were in her future, so today she smiled happily at the sight. The sun was shining down, the rains all but forgotten, and the fields glowed with green health and promise, shot through with blue and silver silken threads to show where streams and rivulets fed the soil.

  All looked clean and pure, not like other places. Inevitably her attention moved beyond the fields, past the larger pastures and water meadows, all bounded by the river as it wound its way northwards.

  She gazed in that direction, feeling faintly troubled. From here she couldn’t see the hills. If she walked up to the warrens on the moorland nearer to Belstone, the long, low blue line on the horizon was plainly visible, but not from here. Her father had told her that it was far-distant Exmoor, and that beyond it was the sea, but she found it hard to believe. It was so far away, it was incomprehensible that it should in truth exist. She had seen far-off towns – she had been to Oakhampton many times, and had even joined her father when he went to market in Tavistock once, miles to the south and west – but to think that somewhere like Exmoor lay there, so distant that even massive hills were an indistinct smudge, was quite difficult to accept. It was scary.

  Sighing, she glanced down at Emma. ‘Come on! We’ll have to set off back home before we even get there, at this rate,’ she called imperiously.

  Emma grinned up at her. Her breast was heaving and she was plainly feeling the warmth. To Joan’s eye she panted like a dog. The sun was beaming down, almost directly overhead, and Emma’s face shone like a cherry. ‘There’s no hurry. Everyone’s out working. They won’t notice we’ve gone for ages.’

  It was rare that there was anything up here of interest. They both visited the moors often enough, sometimes to see the spoor left by the fox which lived up at the wall before the moor, or to steal eggs from the larks and other ground-nesting birds, but they were natural sights. Unusual sights, like the rotting corpse of the wolf which Emma had discovered last year, were unique; not that it stayed there long. The heavy springtime rains had dismembered the remains, washing them away as though they had never existed and the two girls couldn’t even find the skull, no matter how long they searched.

  What a spring it had been! Two houses down in the vill had been flooded and collapsed when their walls were washed away. Poor Ham, the son of William the Taverner, had died when a beam fell on him as he tried to help rescue the animals and belongings from the home of Henry Batyn. It was fortunate that the other buildings survived, and the houses built to replace the fallen ones were almost completed, but Joan still missed Ham. He had been a natural enemy, cat-calling and sneering at her, but sometimes even the loss of an enemy can be sad. His death had left a hole in her life.

  The rains had been terrible. Not so bad as the famine years, all the adults said, but Joan and Emma wouldn’t know that. This was the year of 1322, so the priest told them, when Father Gervase deigned to speak.

  Samson atte Mill said that Emma and Joan were only two and three when the great downpours started. Not that they spoke to Samson much. He was a huge, fearsome man with red, slobbering lips and a brutal expression. Joan had heard horrible stories about him, and she tended to avoid him, but he seemed to like to get close to her. Once he tried to persuade her to kiss him. Not when her parents were around, though, and Joan felt sure it was because he knew it was wrong.

  This year the weather had been worryingly similar to the famine years, everyone said. The rains began in March and continued for weeks on end. Farmers took to watching the skies anxiously, for if the grain they planted were to drown, or grew to produce only weak, spindly plants with feeble, non-nutritious grains which weren’t strong enough to bake into bread or brew into ale, they would starve again. Even the little ovens which the Reeve had persuaded the villagers to build in the communal bakery next to his own house, designed to slowly dry the sodden grain before using it to cook, hadn’t worked well. In Devon, many had died during the famine. All feared another, and their trepidation as they watched their crops being tortured by the torrential downpours was communicated to the children.

  But the rains had stopped, mercifully, in the early summer. Joan felt as though she would always remember that first delicious day when the clouds parted and the sun could at last break through, sending shafts of light to the ground. Before long the soil was heated, so quickly that there was a thin mist of steam. She could see it rising from the earth, as though there was a great fire beneath the land, a health-giving, invigorating fire that soothed and reassured, drying out the sodden fields and transforming people’s pinched grey faces into ones with fresh pink complexions and cheerful expressions.

  It certainly worked wonders on the poor serfs slaving in Lord Hugh’s fields. Joan’s mother, Nicole, declared that it was the first time in weeks that her own clothes had not been soggy. She looked happy, revelling in the sun’s heat, standing at the door of their tiny cottage with her face to the skies, moaning in pleasure, lifting her arms slowly as though in reverence, eyes closed, as though she was drinking in the warmth. She looked almost like a child again; it was odd to see her like that.

  That wasn’t the only great thing that day. The other was that Joan wasn’t told off or smacked once. It felt as though the whole vill was starting a new life together.

  If that had been a marvellous day, she thought happily, this was even better. The two girls shouldn’t really be up here, of course, not so close to the moors, not without permission, for the adults of Sticklepath were always fearful of their children becoming lost or, worse, falling prey to the wild animals or the many treacherous bogs. And there were always the rumours of the ghosts and spirits which inhabited the moorland far from humans. Joan’s mother was petrified by them. She had been brought up in foreign lands, and living in the shadow of the grim hill of Cosdon, the bulky mound that rose up behind Sticklepath and the first of the massive hills of Dartmoor, was awesome. To her the moors were not merely desolate, they were terrifying. She hated Joan going up there on her own or with her friends.

  Joan thought she was silly. Emma and she could look after themselves.

  The path was flatter now, curving with the line of the hillside, solid green banks on both sides like walls. They were passing through sparse woods, the sun overhead making the road’s surface of dark, dusty soil, stones and grass shimmer in the haze, while the ferns and grasses growing in among the banks were dappled with bright light and shadow, as the breeze ruffled
their leaves.

  ‘How much further is it?’ Joan asked. Glancing back towards the town, she saw that the man with the packhorse now stood at the base of the sticklepath itself, looking up the narrow track towards them. ‘We’ll have to set off home soon.’

  Emma didn’t see her glance. She didn’t care about some silly man traipsing about the place with a packhorse. Tranters were two a penny during the summer when travel was less arduous. However, she was always easily offended and now, upset by Joan’s tone, she answered sulkily, ‘It’s just a little further on.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Joan said quickly, not wanting to spoil the mood. Yet for some reason she was feeling apprehensive.

  ‘There it is!’ Emma pointed a few moments later.

  Following her finger, Joan saw that a small section of the bank had been washed away. Loosened, perhaps, by the rains earlier in the year, it had yielded to the weight of a fox or a dog, and the wall of the lane had collapsed. An untidy mess of grey moorstone rubble had slithered into the lane, borne along by the tide of damp soil behind, although the trees and bushes on either side appeared to bulwark the rest of the bank from further disintegration.

  The two girls hurried to the rent in the wall. ‘There, see?’ Emma said, excitedly.

  They crouched side by side and peered. In among the roots Joan thought she could see some cloth, filthy from long immersion in the soil, but still recognisably material of some kind. How peculiar! Someone must have buried it here. Emma had been right when she’d begged Joan to come and see this, saying that it was even more weird than the dead wolf.

  ‘Do you think there’s something wrapped in it?’ Joan said at last.

  ‘Could be, but what would someone wrap in cloth and bury? And why would they have buried it here?’

  ‘It could be gold, stolen by a felon, and hidden here for safekeeping,’ Joan said, reaching out and touching it.