The Templar

Reluctantly, knowing from Baldwin’s stillness as much as from the obvious fear of the two girls that this must be a murder victim, Simon went to join him. He never could understand the knight’s objective approach to bodies. Baldwin was always, so he said, keen to learn as much as he could from a corpse, and after his experiences during a siege when he was a mere youth, he had picked up much about human bodies when sudden violent death was visited upon them. He had told Simon before that if an intelligent man could observe a body correctly, that body could speak of the murderer. There was more to be learned from a corpse than the mere number of wounds or their depth.

When Simon reached his side, he saw that Baldwin was contemplating the body of a young woman with the figure of a Madonna lying at his feet, head nearest him, body pointing to the river. From her hands and trim figure, she had been well-born. Certainly her hands had not seen much hard work. The flesh was clean and pale olive, like a wealthy lady’s, with few calluses. Her dress was a blue tunic, very well cut, with expensive-looking embroidery at the neck, wrists and hem, but blood had soaked into it, turning it into a reeking, blackened mass.

She lay in some long grasses a short way from the river itself. Her arms were at her side; the back of her right hand was scraped, as though it had been rasped with a rock. A nail was torn away. Her head was turned towards the right shoulder, and a thick puddle of blood surrounded her dark hair, in which the first strands of white showed at the temples even through the thick gobbets of gore. Her legs were spread in the unmistakable posture of lovemaking, the skirts thrown up and over her belly revealing the dark triangle at the junction of her thighs. Simon glanced down and saw the marks of blood on the soft inner flesh. He swallowed hard.

This poor woman had not merely been raped; she had been bludgeoned to death, as though her attacker was enraged by her, as though he wanted to remove every sign of her. Her shoulders, hands and face were a mass of ruined flesh, as though the killer wanted to destroy her utterly.

Chapter Six

For Simon, the next half hour or so was disturbing in the extreme. The screams of the two girls had brought some farm labourers running from a field a short way off, and now five men stood scowling grimly at Baldwin and him. A sixth was retching near the river, and being comforted by one of the girls, who was still dreadfully pale, but seemed grateful for the opportunity of forgetting her own horror and concentrating on someone else’s. Another man had gone with her friend into the city to fetch help.

In England, Simon would have known exactly what to do and say. He was not the First Finder, he was the fourth witness to arrive, after the two girls and Baldwin, and could be sure that he would be fined, but that would be the limit of his expense. But he wasn’t in England, he was in Galicia, and he wasn’t sure what the law said about the treatment of witnesses. However, he knew perfectly well that his neighbours in Devonshire, where he lived, would infinitely prefer to accuse a stranger than think that one of their own could have committed a foul murder such as this. If a local jury accused a local man, it was because he was possessed of a ‘common fame’ — an unenviable reputation for theft or robbery or simply mindless violence.

Here, Simon had little idea how matters would stand. He believed in the superiority of the English legal system, in which a man was innocent until proved guilty. In foreign parts, so he had heard, that rule didn’t hold sway, and sometimes a man could be held until he had been tortured to seek the truth. Simon was appalled by the thought that an inquest could rely on the evidence of a man who had been systematically crippled, but he knew that it happened abroad. Baldwin himself was proof of that. The Templars had been tortured, generally one at a time in front of their comrades, so that each should know exactly what was in store for them, should they refuse to confess.

Torture was not routine, apparently, but that was of little consolation, because all knew that the ways of foreign laws were flawed.

Simon licked dry lips as he and Baldwin waited, trying to avoid the hard stares of the peasants. One in particular was holding his long-bladed knife at the ready as though wishing that one of the two would try to escape.