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originally wooden, had been refashioned in stone. They were long, narrow dwellings, one room wide with a main hall in front, then several small bedrooms, and various nooks and crannies for lodging guests and accommodating the resident secondary priest. The few male servants slept either in passages or in the shacks in the garden, which also had a stable, as well as the wash-house and the privy where the body had been found.
    With the coroner’s officer were two servants of the deceased canon, as well as a young secondary and a vicar who deputised for de Hane at many of the daily services. They all looked uneasily at the swarthy coroner as he swept into the kitchen.
    Gwyn eased his huge frame off the corner of the table where he had been sitting. ‘No one seems to have any light to shed on this affair, Crowner,’ he growled, scratching his crotch vigorously, a habit he had akin to Thomas’s tic.
    De Wolfe’s black brows descended as he scowled round the assembled faces. ‘I’ve heard that the canon made some unaccustomed excursions on horseback out of Exeter these past few weeks. Did any of you accompany him?’
    One of the servants, a young man named David, with muscles bulging through the sleeves of his plain hessian tunic, took a step forward. ‘I made his pony ready for him, sir, and offered to go with him, but the Canon was most insistent that he went alone.’
    ‘Was that unusual?’
    ‘It was unusual for him to go anywhere at all, Crowner,’ replied David, who seemed too bright and intelligent to be a lowly yard-servant.
    Then, unwilling to be left out of the picture, his older colleague cut in, ‘Though we have two good horses and a pony in the stable, they are hardly ever used. Their hoofs have to be trimmed for lack of wear on the road.’
    ‘Have you any notion of where he went?’ demanded de Wolfe.
    ‘It couldn’t have been very far,’ said David. ‘The Canon, God rest his soul, was a timid horseman. The nag usually walked for him and rarely got up to a trot. On these trips, he never left the Close until the ninth hour of the morning, and he was back before the city gates shut at dusk, which is early this time of year.’
    John glanced across at his bodyguard. ‘Gwyn, what distance would a slow pony travel in that time?’
    The Cornishman pulled at the ends of his shaggy moustache. ‘Not far – perhaps to the edge of Dartmoor or down to Exmouth and back, I reckon. Depends on how long he stopped to conduct his business when he got there.’
    The coroner turned back to the sturdy young groom. ‘Do you know which way he went?’
    David shrugged. ‘Only on one of the three occasions did I see him leave the city, sir. I was buying fish in Carfoix and I saw him making down the hill towards the West Gate.’
    De Wolfe made the usual grunting noise in his throat. ‘That could lead him to half of Devon. You’ve no idea where he went or what he was doing?’ he persisted, his eyes roving across the others, to be met with sorrowful shakes of their heads.
    ‘He always took a roll of parchment in his saddle-scrip,’ volunteered the younger man, hesitantly. ‘And though the pony came back fairly clean, the Canon’s boots and the hem of his robe were caked with red mud, for I had to clean them.’
    ‘So he must have been walking somewhere away from his horse,’ put in Thomas. This obvious interpretation was received by Gwyn with a pitying scowl.
    As with the meeting with the canons, further questions led to no useful answers and the coroner became impatient. ‘Now that it’s daylight, let’s look again at the place of his death,’ he commanded. He led the group out of the kitchen into the cluttered yard, where chickens and ducks flapped from under their feet. The stench of the privy was no less in daylight, but de Wolfe climbed the rough steps and pulled open the rickety door. The remains of the girdle-cord still hung down from a gnarled rafter, the frayed end swinging gently in the cold