The Treason of the Ghosts

secreto...’ but Bellen had
not continued.
    Corbett
heard Ranulf moving around at the other side of the room.
    ‘He
may not have been a letter writer, Master, but Bellen did like to draw.’
    Corbett
looked round. Ranulf had pulled out a small coffer full of rolls of parchment.
He went across and watched as Ranulf sifted through them. Most of them were
drawings of the church, rather clumsy and childish: the face of a gargoyle, a
pillar, the entrance to the rood screen. Corbett glimpsed one and seized it.
Then, hearing footsteps on the stairs, he quickly folded this up and thrust it
into his wallet. Burghesh tapped on the door and came in.
    ‘Have
you finished, Sir Hugh?’
    In
the light of the lantern he carried, Burghesh looked haggard and worried.
    ‘Yes,
yes, I have finished.’
    ‘And
is there anything? I mean,’ Burghesh stammered, ‘anything to tell us why Robert
should take his own life?’
    ‘I
don’t know.’ Corbett smiled thinly. ‘But Ranulf and I have to return to the
Golden Fleece. The burgesses of Melford will have to do without our company
tonight.’
    He
and Ranulf stepped by Burghesh, went along the gallery and down, out through
the half-open front door.
    ‘Was
it suicide?’ Ranulf asked. ‘It must have been, surely? We were all in the
Guildhall.’
    ‘The
assassin could be someone else,’ Corbett replied evasively.
    ‘Such as?’
    ‘Peterkin; Ralph, the miller’s son.’
    Ranulf
caught his master’s arm. ‘You don’t believe that, do you? Look around, Sir
Hugh.’
    He
gestured across the dark, misty graveyard, the long wet grass, the slanted
crosses, chipped headstones and the dark mass of the church beyond, its door
still open, the steps bathed in a small pool of light.
    ‘Only
the dead can hear you,’ Ranulf murmured. ‘You don’t believe Bellen committed
suicide, do you?’
    ‘No,’
Corbett replied, ‘I don’t. Get into the mind of the man, Ranulf. Bellen may
have been this and he may have been that but he was still a priest, a man of
God. He had a heightened sense of sin: despair and suicide are the greatest
sins. Bellen was anxious but self-composed. I think he knew a lot more than he
told us.’
    ‘But
he died,’ Ranulf insisted. ‘Burghesh did find him swinging on the end of that
bell rope. If Bellen was a man of God, who would regard suicide as a sin, the
same is true of murder. He was strong enough; he wouldn’t have gone to his
death like a lamb to the slaughter.’
    ‘Aye.’
    Corbett
stared at a hummock of grass which almost shrouded a small headstone. For a
brief moment he wondered if it really mattered. All living beings on the face
of God’s earth ended their lives in places like this. Elizabeth Wheelwright,
Sir Roger Chapeleys, all sleeping that eternal dream.
    ‘It’s
cold,’ Corbett declared.
    ‘I
didn’t find Blidscote. He may have had a hand in this.’
    ‘I
doubt it,’ Corbett replied.
    He
gathered his cloak around him, putting on his gloves. He listened to the lonely
hoot of an owl in the trees at the far end of the graveyard.
    ‘I
wager a tun of wine to a tun of wine, Ranulf, that Blidscote is as dead as any
that lie here.’
    ‘Just because I didn’t find him?’
    ‘I
wonder if we ever will. But come, Ranulf, I need to think, sit and plot.’
    They
went through the lych-gate. Corbett looked down the lonely lane, ghostly in the
pale moonlight. He was tempted to go and see Old Mother Crauford and Peterkin
but then he heard voices. People were coming up towards the church as the news
spread. He needed to impose some order on what he had learnt.
    They
returned to the Golden Fleece, to be greeted by scowls and unspoken curses.
Corbett ignored them as he stood looking around.
    ‘Whom
do you want?’ Matthew the taverner came up.
    ‘Master
Blidscote — I don’t suppose he’s been in tonight?’
    ‘No,
Sir Hugh, he hasn’t.’ The taverner glanced at him sly-eyed. ‘But the news about
Curate Robert is known by all. They are calling you the Death Bringer.’
    ‘I’m
not that!’ Corbett snapped. ‘Master taverner...’ Then he thought better of what
he’d been about to say. ‘I’ll be in my chamber if anyone wishes to see me.’
    Ranulf
stayed, determined not to be bullied by the dark looks and seething hostility
of the taproom. Once he was in his chamber, Corbett lit a candle and prepared
his writing desk. He took out the scrap of parchment from the curate’s chamber
and studied the outline of the