‘Christ be praised,’ Buchan said, putting a hand over his lower face.
‘For ever and ever,’ the other two intoned.
Then Sim poked his gauntleted hand in the ruin of it, peeled back something which could have been cloth or rotted flesh and pointed to a small mark on a patch of mottled blue-black.
‘Stabbed,’ he declared. ‘Upward. Thin-bladed dagger – look at the edges here. A wee fluted affair by the look. Straight to his heart and killit him dead.’
Hal and Sim looked at each other. It was an expert stroke from a particular weapon and only a man who killed with it regularly would keep a dagger like that about him. Wildly, Hal almost asked Buchan if he and Bruce had hunted in these woods before and had lost a henchman. He thought of the two deerhounds, slathered with balm and praises, and the dead alaunt, bitterly buried by the Berner.
‘So,’ Sim declared. ‘A particular slaying – what make ye of this, Hal? When the slayer was throwin’ him down, d’ye think?’
It was a cloth scrap, a few threads and patch no bigger than a fingernail, caught in the buckle of the dead man’s scrip baldric. It could have been from the man’s own cloak, or another part of his clothing for all the cloth was rotted and colour-drained, but Hal did not think so and said as much.
Sim thought and stroked the grizzle of his chin, disturbed a louse and chased it until he caught it in two fingers and flicked it casually away. He turned to Hal and Buchan, who was wishing he could leave the festering place but was determined, on his honour and duty as an earl of the realm, to stay as long as the others.
‘This is the way of it, I am thinking,’ Sim said. ‘A man yon poor soul knows comes to him, so getting near enough to strike. They are in the dark, ken, and neb to neb, which is secretive to me. Then the chiel with the dagger strikes . . .’
He mimicked the blow, then grabbed Hal by the front of his clothes and heaved him, as if throwing him over on to the ground. He was strong and Hal was taken by surprise, stumbled and was held up by Sim, who smiled triumphantly and nodded down to where the pair of them were locked, buckle to buckle, Sim’s leg between Hal’s two.
Hal staggered upright as Sim let go, then explained what had just happened to the bewildered Buchan, who had understood one in six words of Sim’s explanation in Lowland Lothian. Like wood popping in a fire, the earl thought.
‘Aye,’ Hal said at the end of it, ‘that would do it, right enough – well worked, Sim Craw.’
‘Which does not explain,’ Buchan said, ‘who this man is. He is no peasant with these clothes – Kirkpatrick said as much when he was here.’
‘Did he so?’ mused Sim, then looked closely at the dead man, half yellow bone, half black strips of rot, some cloth, some flesh. An insect scuttled from a sleeve, down over the knucklebones, slithering under a mottled leather pouch. Sim worried the pouch loose, trying to ignore the crack of the small bones and the waft of new rot that came with him disturbing the body. He opened it, shook the contents on to the palm of his hand and they peered. Silver coins, a lump of metal with horsehair string attached, a medallion stamped with the Virgin and Child.
‘No robbery, then,’ Hal declared, then frowned and indicated the brown, skeletal hand.
‘Yet a finger has been cut.’
‘To get at a tight-fitting ring,’ Sim said, with the air of man who was no stranger to it, and Buchan lifted an eyebrow at the revelation.
‘Yet no other rings are taken,’ he pointed out, and Hal sighed.
‘A wee cat’s cradle of clues, right enow,’ he declared, looking at the contents of the purse. The medallion was a common enough token, a pardoner’s stock in trade to ward off evil, but the teardrop metal lump and string was a puzzler.
‘Fishing?’ Buchan suggested hesitantly and Hal frowned; he did not know what it was but fishing seemed unlikely. Besides, it was knotted in regular progression and unravelled to at least the height of a man.
‘It is a plumb line,’ Sim said. ‘A mason uses it to mark where he wants stone cut – see, you chalk the string, hold the free end and let the weight dangle, then pluck it like a harp string to leave a chalk line on the stone.’
‘The knots?’
‘Measurement,’ Sim answered.
‘A mason?’ Buchan repeated, having picked that part out ‘Is this certes?’
Hal looked at Sim, eyebrows raised quizzically.
‘Am I certes? Is a wee dug bound by a blood puddin’?’ Sim answered indignantly. ‘I am Leadhoose born, up by the wee priory of St Machutus what the Tironensians live in. My father was lifted to work with the monks, who were God’s gift for buildin’.’