Blood on Satan's Claw: or, the Devil's Skin by Robert Wynne-Simmons

Author:Robert Wynne-Simmons
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789651577
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2022-10-12T16:37:36+00:00

Chapter Eight

The Burial

he crows were gathering again over Tarrant’s Field when Peter Edmonton went to inform the Squire of the death of Ellen Vespers’ son. Ellen had only recently nursed him back to health, but now the roles were reversed, and Peter had to look after her in her grief, to console her in all her pain after the terrible death of her son and try to make some sense of it. Circumstances had altered everything in his life, and from being a bookish, pen-pushing law student he had suddenly become a gentleman farmer, something for which he felt completely unsuited, but, as he told the Squire, he was prepared to take on most things and learn. Helping to run the farm and participating in some physical labour himself had a curative effect, although he had to confess that the horror of this latest atrocity was almost too much for him.

‘Too much for you, eh?’ said the Squire. ‘Well, it is not too much for me!’ Squire Middleton, who had given up the hunt for Isobel Banham with some relief after the Judge had gone, found himself galvanised into action by this new case. He listened with growing horror and anger to the details of it.

‘I am for the most part a tolerant man,’ he said, ‘but there is one thing I cannot tolerate, and that is attacks upon children.’

The Squire had always wanted a son of his own, but his overbearing wife, his Joan, had proved barren. It was one of the tragedies of his life that he had no-one to teach or to take over his estates, and the murder of a young boy held for him a particularly bitter taste. He took it upon himself, as a matter of urgency, to discover the cause of the boy’s death, and find the culprit, which he assured everyone he would surely do, and when he did there would be hell to pay. He asked for Mark’s corpse to be laid before him, and puzzled over it for a while with sadness and confusion. It was the large wound on the boy’s leg that attracted most of his attention, and that, he declared, must be the cause of his death. He completely ignored the bruises on his neck, and, as was his way, he jumped to the first conclusion that fitted.

‘It must be a wild beast,’ he said. ‘We have too many wild pigs in our woodland, and they must be hunted and killed.’

Peter gently dismantled this theory. If it was a wild beast, why did that beast go to the length of hiding the body under a pile of wood in a shed?

‘Perhaps it was building some sort of nest there.’

‘And that in a farmyard, with nobody noticing?’

Squire Middleton had to admit even to himself that perhaps he had been a little hasty, but he had not wanted to consider the other possibility, that there had been a human hand involved. All the same, he was slowly forming a new opinion.

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