Brother Cadfael 19: The Holy Thief

rounded handle might have done such damage, but the crater it had made was large indeed, and jagged, not regular. Cadfael took up carefully the edge of the hood, and rounded it out on his fist. It was seamed at the back, and running his fingertips the length of the seam he encountered a small patch halfway down that was sticky and stiffening, and withdrew them smeared with drying blood. Very little blood, surely from the first blow that felled its victim through hood and all. And this was at the back of the head, only the central seam contaminated, and that only meagrely. He straightened the folds, and ran his fingers through the dead youth's thick thatch of reddish-brown hair, up from the nape to the rounding at the back of the head, where that seam had rested, and surely helped to break the force of the blow. He found a graze that had oozed a small crust of blood into the thick hair, almost dry now. There was no break there in the skull beneath the skin.
    "It was no very fearful blow that felled him," said Cadfael. "It cannot have knocked him out of his wits for very long, had that been all. What was done after, was done quickly, before he could come to himself. He would never have died of this. And yet what followed was cold, deliberate and final. A drunken man in a squabble could have done this."
    "It did what was required of it," said Hugh grimly. "Laid him at his enemy's mercy. No haste! Time to judge and finish at leisure."
    Cadfael straightened out the coarse folds of the hood, and shook out a few pale feathery fragments from among them. He rubbed them in his palm, slivers of tindery, rotted wood. Plenty of that, no doubt, in this overgrown, untended woodland, even after it had been combed for firing by the urchins of the Foregate. But why here in Aldhehn's hood? He ran his hands over the shoulders of the cloak, and found no more such minute splinters. He lifted the edge of the hood, and laid it gently over the shattered head, hiding the face. Behind him he felt, rather than heard, Tutilo's deep intake of breath, and sensed the quiver that passed through him.
    "Wait a few moments yet. Let's see if the murderer left any trace behind, if he stood here any length of time waiting for his man." For here was certainly the closest cover on all that path from the ferry down into the Foregate. The track had, he recalled, two branches, separating as it dropped from the heathy ridge that looked down upon the river. One branch went down directly to the Horse Fair, the other, this one, cut through to emerge halfway along the Foregate, almost within sight of the abbey gatehouse. By this one Tutilo must have set out for Longner, and by this one he had returned, only to happen upon this grievous discovery along the way. If, of course, he had ever been nearer to Longner, that night, than this disastrous place.
    Cadfael stepped back to measure again the angle at which the body lay, and the few paces back along the path where the assailant must have been hidden. Thick cover, bristling with dryish branches and twigs, dead wood among them; he looked for broken ends, and found them. "Here!" He thrust through the screen of growth sidelong, into cramped space between trees, where a thin grass grew, mottled with dead leafage and glistening from the night's rain. Soft ground, trodden flat by uneasy, shifting feet not so many hours ago. Nothing else, except a thick dead branch lying tossed under the bushes, and just aside from it, the bleached shape in the grass where it had formerly lain. Cadfael stooped and picked it up, and the thicker end, broken and dangling, shed a fluttering debris of tindery flakes as he swung it in his hand. Thick enough and heavy enough, but brittle.
    "Here he waited. Some time, by the way he's pounded the mould. And this, this was what he found to his hand. With this he struck the first blow, and broke it in striking."
    Hugh eyed the branch, and gnawed a thoughtful lip. "But not the second blow, surely. Not with this! It would have shattered in flinders long before it did that damage."
    "No, this he threw back into the bushes when it snapped and turned in his hand. And looked quickly for something more deadly? For clearly, if ever he trusted to this in the first place, he had come without any weapon." Perhaps even, thought Cadfael, prompted a step further, he came without even the intent to kill, since he did not come prepared. "Wait! Let's see what offered."
    For he could not have had to look far for