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Day One
Godfrid
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“What do you make of all this, Gareth?” Godfrid was moving quickly at Gareth’s side, both taking long strides to get out of the rain, which was coming down hard now.
Fortunately, a folded hemp tarp had been readily available in the shed that housed the tools for the maintenance of the church grounds. Both Godfrid and Gareth had gone to enough funerals to have expected to find it there. Usually gravediggers mounded the dirt taken out of a grave on a tarp so the soil could be easily deposited over the body after the funeral, and the surrounding graves were not inadvertently covered over with excess dirt.
“I’m trying very hard to make nothing of it as yet.” Gareth hunched his shoulders against the rain.
Godfrid had no such qualms about speculation. “Someone killed a man and, to cover it up, buried him in a grave already belonging to someone else. Then either that man or another man—”
“Or woman,” Gareth interjected. “Best not to rule anyone out this early.”
“I don’t see a woman doing this,” Godfrid said. “Few women would have the strength to bury Aelred, much less unbury him.”
“I would not have said unbury was a word, but if it isn’t, it definitely should be.” Gareth reached the church porch a stride before Godfrid and pushed back his hood, the water from it dripping onto the stones at his feet.
“We will keep it for our own private use.” Godfrid joined him, grateful to be out of the wet.
“Hopefully, we won’t have to use it very often after this.”
“Regardless, someone dug up the body—“
“Unburied it,” Gareth corrected.
“—hauled it into the church, and propped it up in the priest’s chair.” Godfrid finished his sentence as if Gareth hadn’t spoken.
“That does seem to describe the facts as we currently know them. It is possible, if you are feeling we must dismiss the idea of a woman doing the heavy lifting, that it would be a different matter if she had help.”
“You do not comfort me.” Godfrid laughed. “And you don’t have to tell me what’s possible. My own wife, were she not pregnant, would be perfectly capable of digging a hole and dumping a body into it if she had to.” He loved his wife to distraction, and part of the reason he had found her so attractive was because she was very practical. If Cait saw something that needed doing, she did it. And if she’d felt threatened by Aelred, she would have done what she had to, up to and including killing him, to protect herself. He couldn’t pretend he wasn’t proud of that fact.
“That’s the crucial issue, isn’t it?” Gareth said. “If she had to.”
“Thus, before the hauling about, burying, and unburying, there was an initial murder—”
“Let’s just say initial death,” Gareth put in.
Godfrid nodded, neither of them in any way fussed by the back and forth between them. Rather, that they could speak to each other this way made the pursuit of this investigation more palatable. If Conall had been with them, rather than off to find the priest, he would have joined in with enthusiasm.
“Initial death, then. Burying the body in a convenient spot smacks of desperation, not premeditation. Whether an accident or on purpose, the death was not planned, and the burial of it was not planned either.”
“Which is why I can’t rule out the possibility that a woman did this.”
Godfrid grunted. “Agreed. I will hold my speculation in abeyance for now.”
“I’m not ruling out robbery either, but ...” Gareth untied the leather thong that held Aelred’s purse closed and spilled the contents into his palm.
Out came tinder and flint, for lighting a fire, and a smooth stone, one that could have been picked up from any creek bed. These items could be found in any man’s purse. Really, Aelred was just so ordinary, it was hard to imagine why he’d died, been buried over the top of another body, and then unburied. If he’d had money, which seemed unlikely given the quality of the purse, the person who’d buried him had taken it with them.
“Is it time to examine the body?” Godfrid suddenly wished Gareth had asked him to find the priest instead of Conall.
“Long past time, but there’s something I want to show you inside the church first.”
Shaking out their wet cloaks, they stood for a moment in the entryway. The church was unchanged from when Godfrid had last seen it, except for Aelred’s absence, which was a relief. The smell seemed a little better too, though still musty and lip curling the closer they got to where the body had been.
Gareth led Godfrid past the priest’s chair to the chancel, the area reserved for churchmen. “What do you see?”
“Choir stalls.” Godfrid’s eyes narrowed as he looked them up, down, and around and could find nothing amiss. “What are you seeing that I’m not?”
“They’re new—or at least newish.” Gareth put his nose to the front rail and sniffed, after which he gestured for Godfrid to do the same. “You can still smell the oil used on them. It wasn’t done this week, but it was done in the past few months.” He paused. “Maybe even, one could guess, three months ago. You couldn’t smell it before from over there because it's faded with time and, of course, the scent of Aelred was overwhelming.”
Godfrid sniffed as he was bid. Linseed oil permeated the wood and thus his nostrils. “All right. I smell it. Why is it important?”
“Now step away and put your nose to this.” From underneath his cloak where he’d tucked it, Gareth pulled out the length of linen likely used to wrap Aelred. He didn’t bother unfolding it for Godfrid’s momentary sniff.
Given that a dead man had been wrapped in the cloth for the last three months, Godfrid was reluctant in the extreme to put his nose to it, but Gareth kept holding it out, and Godfrid accepted that his friend was trying to make a point. He sniffed, and then took an involuntary step back. “It smells the same. Linseed oil.”
“So I thought.”
Godfrid tipped his head towards the door. “Let me clear my senses, and then I can try again.”
Gareth obligingly walked out the door and back into the porch. The squall that had driven them from the graveyard was coming to an end, and the air was fresh with the smell of wet grass and earth.
This time, Godfrid was willing to keep his nose in the cloth for a few heartbeats longer. It was still appalling to be smelling the cloth used to wrap a dead man, but he no longer feared the scent of decay.
“Oil,” he said definitively.
“Even after three months in the ground,” Gareth agreed, “which means that this cloth came from the church and had potentially been used to protect the floor, let’s say, during the oiling of the new choir stalls.”
“Now we know where he died!” Godfrid looked at Gareth over the cloth. “This could also tell us when.”
“Maybe. At the very least, we can place the person who buried Aelred inside the church when he died.”
