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Day One
Godfrid
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As they left the laying-out room, Dunstan laid a gentle hand on Godfrid’s arm. “May I invite you to my home instead of the great hall, Godfrid?”
“Certainly, Father, but the hall is just there.” Godfrid was still damp from the earlier rainstorm and a cup of mulled wine and a warm fire beckoned.
“I don’t know that I am in the right frame of mind to succor my flock.”
Godfrid’s step faltered. “My apologies, Father, I didn’t think.”
Dunstan lifted a hand. “To you, the hall is a source of fellowship and warmth, which of course it is to me as well. But while being a priest is a calling, there are times I need to not be on duty.”
“Of course.”
Dunstan led the way to a line of houses that clustered on the northern side of the outer bailey. While many of the castle workers lived in the town, others had homes within the walls, and the priest was one of them. The bailey was so large, really, that it could have fit an entire village inside it. In a way it did. The priest’s house was a typical wattle and daub structure with a thatched roof. It wasn’t large, but it was certainly large enough for the needs of the priest, who lived alone.
A fire burned low in the central hearth, and Dunstan stirred it to life. When next he spoke, it was to the fire rather than to Godfrid, for whom the words were obviously meant. “Are you going to tell me what is troubling you, or do I have to drag it out of you?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’m sure you do.” Dunstan reached up to a shelf and pulled down two cups, which he filled by ladle from a pot hanging over the fire. Godfrid was getting mulled wine after all. “I may not have seen you since you were a youth, but I know you, Godfrid. You can’t lie to me—or at least not successfully. We are both troubled by the discovery of the body, but your concern goes deeper than mine. Tell me.”
With a sigh, Godfrid accepted the cup and then settled on a stool before the fire. He took a sip before he spoke, letting the wine warm him and knowing the priest was willing to wait. “I did not mean to lie to you. I’m sorry if I attempted to hide what was in my heart.”
“That is the second time you’ve apologized to me since we left the laying-out room. I am not fragile, my friend. You don’t have to soothe me.”
“But maybe you have to soothe me.” Godfrid rested his chin in his hand. He’d felt like he’d been looming over the priest, and the change in elevation put them on more equal footing. “Honestly, I’m almost embarrassed to tell you.”
Dunstan sat opposite Godfrid on another stool and sipped his wine, his eyes dark and the firelight dancing over his face.
Finally, Godfrid couldn’t let the silence drag out any longer. “Back at the church, before you arrived, I spent a considerable amount of time postulating all the ways the church’s priest could have been responsible for the unburying of the body.”
Dunstan smiled into his cup. “Should I be offended or relieved you didn’t suppose I’d murdered him?”
“It seemed unlikely, but with the world the way it is, nothing is impossible.”
“And you need me to say that I didn’t do it?” Dunstan nodded in answer to his own question. “I didn’t kill poor Aelred, if that’s really who is dead. I didn’t bury him or unbury him.”
Godfrid let out a tremulous breath. “Thank you.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you either, my son. Truly, I wish I had done it, if only to relieve the concern I see in all of you.” Now he shook his head. “I see death and grief on a daily basis, but investigating death is not something I have ever encountered before.”
“Surely men have died by unnatural causes in your parishes? I know it happened weekly growing up in Dublin.”
“Of course it did, but the one responsible was always obvious and thus quickly dealt with.” Dunstan made a rueful face. “That would be even more true in Dublin. How many Danes of your acquaintance are likely to commit murder in the dark? We raid, yes. We love the element of surprise. But when we attack, you have to admit we tend to be loud about it.”
“That was what King David said about Scots too, and I suppose that was always my experience before encountering Gareth. Since meeting him, I have discovered that sometimes the culprit isn’t the first man who comes forward, even if he’s Danish.”
“And in the case of Aelred, the culprit isn’t obvious at all. Is that what you’re saying? Is that why I’ve become someone you suspect?”
Godfrid tsked under his breath. “I don’t suspect you.”
“But you did before you realized you knew me. Tell me why.” It was a command, certainly, but not an unwelcome one.
And still, even though he trusted Dunstan, Godfrid wasn’t quite ready to give up all his secrets so easily, even to his old friend. As he sat before the fire, in the back of his mind he couldn’t help thinking that he’d been lied to in the past and done his fair share of lying himself. Danes weren’t quite so open and predictable as Dunstan was saying. “Why are you asking?”
“Because maybe I can help. You obviously suspected the priest for a reason. Maybe someone else in the castle or the city of Carlisle is like me but you don’t know him yet because you haven’t asked.” And then he smiled. “And maybe you’ll decide you still suspect me.”
Godfrid took a drink of the wine, rolling the liquid around in his mouth while he thought. He had to admit that by now the priest knew most of what he himself knew. It seemed petty to hide the rest. “You had access to the graveyard and church more than anyone. You knew what grave would be easy to dig into when Aelred died three months ago, so you would have known where he was buried to unbury him today. You would know when the church was empty and when it wasn’t, and you are such a familiar sight around the place that even if someone saw you, they wouldn’t think you were lurking.”
“The church is within the castle walls,” Dunstan said gently. “It has a hundred visitors a day. In the dark, anyone could move about unseen.”
“Not anyone. Not really. King David can’t.”
“His steward could, however.”
Godfrid hadn’t considered that possibility. Really, he didn’t know anyone at Carlisle well enough to guess how easily they could have wandered the graveyard for a period of time before Margaret Carr went to the church.
“I’m not sure the steward’s heart would survive the digging.” Godfrid felt a little better about being so open with Dunstan.
“Nor mine?” The old priest prodded the fire with a tong. “If I could do it, he could do it.”
Godfrid bobbed his head. “Then there’s the way the body was left in the church. The person who left him in the priest’s chair—your chair—not only brushed the dirt off his face but cleaned the floor afterwards.”
“Why would I have done this?”
“Out of respect for the holy place and the dead.”
Dunstan looked down, pressing his lips together, and Godfrid could see the objections forming.
“Just say what you’re thinking.”
“If I killed this poor fellow, wouldn’t I simply leave him in the ground?”
“You would.”
“Then I don’t understand.”
Godfrid made a motion with his cup. “The idea was that either you killed him or you left him in the chair, but not both, for exactly the reason you’re saying. One idea put forth was that the killer confessed to you that he’d killed Aelred, and leaving the body in the church was the only way to expose this killer without breaking the sanctity of your office. Since speaking to you, every theory has fallen apart, since you were with a dying woman all evening, I can’t see how you would have had time between the end of mass and your duties to dig up the body, never mind leave it in the church and clean up after yourself.”
“I can bolster my alibi further by telling you that the son of the woman who died came to mass and stayed with me while I put away my vestments. We walked together to his mother’s house.” Dunstan’s head was up. “But I am curious now! While it could not have been me, you are suggesting that someone left poor Aelred in my chair as a warning or a message to the killer that God sees him, and he can’t get away with murder?”
“Yes. That was the general idea.”
“Why wait three months to do this?”
Godfrid sighed, returning his chin to his hand. “I don’t know. It’s a good thing Gareth is the main investigator, because none of this makes any sense to me.”
“Thinking like a murderer is unnatural to you. If you were to kill a man, you would own the deed, whether or not you intended it to happen. This fellow—” Dunstan shook his head, “—both the murderer and the one who unearthed the body, if they are not one and the same—lurks about in the dark. If I had to guess, as a lifelong student of men, something changed recently, or even today, that made this a secret someone no longer felt he could keep.”
