Revenge of the Black Knight by Paulene Turner

Author:Paulene Turner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Salty Dog Press
Published: 2023-09-05T03:21:38+00:00

Every morning, it was some poor sod’s job to draw buckets of water from the castle well for cooking and washing. It was tough work and the guys who did it had muscles like boulders. They could draw bucket after bucket without raising a sweat.

But this morning, the servant on duty sweated profusely as he hauled up the first load for the day. For lying on top of the bucket was one of his fellow servants—the man who lit the castle fires.

The poor man got such a shock, he let go of the rope and the bucket with the dead body on it unravelled all the way back to the bottom. When he’d got himself together, he had to haul it up all over again.

I’d just woken up when I heard the shouts. So I threw my dress on and hurried outside. A group of servants, trembling and whimpering, had formed a circle around the dead man. Pushing through to see, I reeled back at my first sight of the body. The man’s skin was sickly white, his neck a mass of blood and torn flesh. Ghastly! Riley was already there, crouching down to examine him. He had done a Crime Scene Investigation course in the summer holidays at a government lab while the rest of us were at the beach.

“Cause of death—having his throat cut,” he whispered to me.

Well, thank you, Sherlock Holmes! I could have worked that one out on my own. He felt the man’s cheek and lifted the guy’s arm up and dropped it. It was already stiffening up and made everyone gag.

“Given the extent of rigor mortis,” Riley said, “he probably died round 5am.”

Poor guy. My stomach churned.

The head servant questioned all the castle staff to determine whether any of them had killed their colleague in a fit of petty pique. But no clear suspect or motive for murder emerged.

Who else might have done the deed? An intruder, who’d got past the guards and snuck into the castle during the night? Or someone living among us?

“Why would anyone want to kill a guy whose sole purpose in life was to warm the rooms before we got up?” I said.

“Perhaps he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time?” Riley said.

That sounded possible. “You mean he might have seen something he wasn’t meant to see?” I said.

Riley nodded.

But of course, we had no way of knowing for sure. And the clue trail had gone cold—like all the castle rooms. I found myself shivering at odd times that day and not just because of the temperature. It was the thought there could be a murderer among us, smiling a good morning as they passed by. Hiding in plain sight.

Around mid-morning, Tristan and Fletcher Senior arrived at the castle looking so grim I thought they must have heard about the murder. But that wasn’t it.

The Fletchers were here for crisis talks, Alistair told Riley later. It seemed Tristan had nearly driven their arrow empire into bankruptcy when he’d omitted a zero on a quote for a consignment of arrows for a local noble.

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