The Anger of God

prosperous-looking relic-seller lay out his stall and shout for custom. Cranston smiled mirthlessly as the fellow crowed, his words carrying faintly from the street below.
    ‘Look, I have Jesus’s tooth which he lost at the age of twelve! A finger of St Sylvester! A piece of the saddle on which Christ sat when he entered Jerusalem. And in this casket, specially embossed, the arm of St Polycarp — the only thing left after the lions tore him to pieces in the arena at Rome ! Gentle folk all, these relics, blessed by the Holy Father, can and will perform miracles!’
    Cranston watched the crowd of easily gulled spectators cluster around. A rogue, he thought. He looked across at the corpse laid out on the four-poster bed, the winding sheet, carefully wrapped round it, exposing only the face which now lay back, jaw gaping, eyes half-open.
    ‘I am sorry, Oliver,’ Cranston muttered to the silent room. He got up, crossed to the four-poster bed and stared down at the grey, sunken face of his former comrade.
    ‘I am sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I, Sir John Cranston, King’s Coroner in London, a man who sups with princes, the husband of Lady Maude of Tweng in Somerset, father of the two poppets, my beloved sons Francis and Stephen — I am sorry I could not help you. You, my comrade-in-arms, my right hand in our battles against the French. Now you lie murdered and I can’t even prove it.’
    Cranston gazed round the bed chamber, noting the rich possessions: the silver cups, the finely carved lavarium, cupboards and chairs quilted with taffeta, the silken cushions, testers, the gold filigree candelabra.
    ‘What does it profit a man,’ Cranston muttered, ‘if he gains the whole world — only to be murdered by his wife?’
    He fished in his wallet, brought out two pennies, fixed them on the dead man’s eyes then covered the face with the sheet. He sighed, walked to the foot of the bed, and jumped at a sudden scurrying sound behind him.
    ‘Bloody rats!’ he muttered as he glimpsed the sleek, long-tailed, fat rodent slide under a cupboard and scrabble at the wooden panelling. Another darted from beneath the lavarium and easily dodged the candlestick an infuriated Cranston flung in its direction.
    ‘Bloody rats!’ he repeated. ‘The city’s infested with them. The heat’s brought them out.’
    He stared at the lonely, sheeted corpse of his friend. He had arrived to find Sir Oliver Ingham not only dead for hours, but with two rats gnawing at his hand. Cranston had roared abuse at Ingham’s pretty young wife but she had smiled slyly and said she had done her best to protect her husband’s body since it had been found by a servant earlier in the day.
    ‘He had a weak heart, Sir John,’ she lisped, one soft, white hand on the arm of her ‘good kinsman’ Albric Totnes.
    ‘Some kinsman!’ Cranston muttered to himself. ‘I bet the two were dancing between the sheets even as Oliver died. Bloody murderers!’
    He dug into his wallet and fished out a short letter Oliver Ingham had sent him only the previous day. Cranston sat down and read it again as his large, protuberant eyes filled with tears.

    I am dying, old friend. I committed the worst folly of an old man: I married someone two score years younger than me. A veritable May and December marriage, but I thought she would love me. I found she did not. Yet her smile and touch were enough. Now I find she has betrayed me and could possibly plot my death. If I die suddenly, old friend, if I die alone, then it will be murder. My soul will cry to God for vengeance and to you for justice. Do not forget me.
    Oliver

    Cranston neatly folded the piece of parchment and put it away. He had shown it to no one yet he believed his friend was right. Something in Cranston ’s blood whispered ‘Murder’, but how could he prove it? Sir Oliver had been found dead in his bed at mid-morning by a servant and Cranston , as both his friend and Coroner, had been sent for. He had arrived to find Ingham’s young wife, Rosamund, supping with her ‘kinsman’ in the solar below, whilst the family physician, a balding, ferret-faced man in smelly robes, had simply declared that Sir Oliver’s weak heart had given out and his soul was gone to God.
    Cranston got up and walked to the side of the bed where the jug, knocked from its table by Oliver in his final apoplexy, still lay. At his insistence the doctor had sniffed the jug and then the cup, Oliver’s favourite, and solemnly