It took two of us to remove each of the boots because the leather was so saturated with water. Despite our labours, I was cold. The temperature in the basement seemed to drop lower and lower. The water chilled my hands and splashed over my clothes.
‘Who has a key?’ I said, panting, when Alderley’s feet were bare, exposing untrimmed nails like pale talons.
Milcote lobbed a boot into the corner. ‘Mr Hakesby. I have a set, too – I have all the household keys. My lord has another set, though those are never used and lie locked in his closet. Then there’s the steward’s – Gorse would have used the pavilion key from there.’
‘And the house and garden?’
‘Locked as tight as a drum. We take no chances, not after those attacks on my lord. During the night, the mastiffs are loose in the garden, and watchmen make an hourly circuit. There are two porters awake in the house, and lanterns in the forecourt.’
‘Then how did Alderley get here?’ I asked.
Milcote shrugged. ‘It’s a perfect mystery. Unless he came during the day, while the men were here. And he was already dead when they locked up.’
This was an echo of my own thoughts, and it led me back to Hakesby and Cat. I turned to Alderley and unstrapped his belt. The breeches were almost as hard to remove as the boots had been.
Death makes a man small as well as making him ridiculous. When we had stripped Alderley to his shirt, he looked shrunken and as vulnerable as a child. Milcote held up the lantern and I examined the body as best I could. There were grazes on the forearms and shoulders, and much broken skin on the fingers. They told their own grim story of a drowning man struggling in the water, enclosed by the sheer walls of the well. I felt the skull and found a bruise on the forehead.
Had he hit his head as he was falling down the well? Or had someone hit him beforehand?
Crouching, we rolled him on to his back again. Milcote watched closely as I turned my attention to the pockets. Alderley had been carrying a purse containing nearly thirty shillings in silver and two pounds in gold. That was a small fortune to most people; but poverty was a relative condition.
There were also two keys on a ring. One was made of blackened iron and had a long shank. The other was much smaller, and far more delicate: it appeared to be made of silver, and had a finely wrought ring at the top that contained what looked like a monogram. I held up the second key to the light of the window, but the letters were so entwined and so clogged with delicate arabesques that I could not even distinguish whether there were two or three of them.
Next, in an inner pocket, I found a sodden bundle of papers. I tried to separate the leaves from each other but the paper tore.
‘Have you a pouch or bag I could use?’ I asked.
‘What?’ Milcote dragged his eyes away from Alderley’s possessions. ‘A pouch?’
‘I’ll take these with me. I need something to put them in.’
He nodded. ‘Of course.’
He went away and came back with a small bag of coarse canvas, its top secured with a drawstring. ‘Will this do?’
‘Admirably.’
He opened the bag, shook out its contents, a dozen or so newly forged nails, on the floor, and passed it to me. I put the papers, the key and money into it.
‘He used to live in Barnabas Place in Holborn,’ I said. ‘A big place – you could house an army in it. Was he still there?’
‘No. He had to sell it and most of the contents to pay his own debts. But he retained an interest in another house nearby, and he was living there. In Fallow Street.’
‘Did you ever go there?’
Milcote shook his head. ‘We met at a tavern or he came here. He grumbled about how small his lodgings were. And it was mortgaged, too, and he’d had to let part of it to a carpenter.’ He gave me a rueful smile. ‘I think he was ashamed. He didn’t want me to see how mean his condition had become. In truth, I didn’t know him that well, but I felt sorry for him.’
I turned back to the body. Alderley’s mouth had fallen open. I took up the sword. It was a narrow blade of fine steel. Two silk ribbons, one red and one blue, had been knotted around the hilt. Perhaps some lady had given them to him to wear as her favour. A design had been engraved on the blade just below the hilt. I held the sword up to the light and recognized the form of a pelican eating its young, the Alderley crest.
‘It’s an old Clemens Horn,’ Milcote said. He stretched out his hand and touched the blade with lingering respect, as a man might touch the hand of a beautiful woman who did not belong to him. ‘German. Must be nigh on fifty years old, but you won’t find a better sword.’
‘I should like to see the well,’ I said.
It was a relief to move away from the body. Milcote and I lifted off the cover and laid it on the floor. It moved easily. A man could have removed it by himself, if necessary. Or, for that matter, a woman.
Milcote crouched on the edge and held the lantern over the void. I could see nothing beyond its light. At my request, he took a rope and attached it to the ring at the top of the lantern. He lowered the light into the well. It glistened on cleanly cut masonry – the shaft was lined with stone, not brick.
Another thought struck me – and again I kept it to myself. I liked what I had seen of Milcote but he and I served different masters.
The lantern twisted and turned as it descended. It seemed to take weeks for it to reach the water.
‘Mr Hakesby measured it,’ Milcote said. ‘It’s about forty feet to the water level. And the depth of the water is another twenty feet, more or less.’
I remembered the bruises and scrapes on Alderley’s body. Could he swim? I imagined him thrashing about in the well, desperately trying to find a handhold, a toehold, on that smooth, curved masonry. And all the time, the water drawing him down into its cold embrace.
I could not afford these thoughts, and I seized on a distraction. ‘How did you get the body out?’ It was such an obvious question that I was ashamed that it hadn’t occurred to me before.
‘Gorse and I used the hoist.’ Milcote waved his free hand in the direction of the wooden framework I had noticed in the corner of the cellar behind the well, beside a pile of scaffolding. ‘It’s the masons’. They used it when they were repointing the well. Gorse went down, and he got a couple of hooks in Alderley’s belt.’
‘He must be a capable man,’ I said. ‘Rather him than me.’
‘He’s seen worse, I daresay,’ Milcote said. ‘He told me he was once apprenticed to a butcher, though he and his master did not suit. But before he left his indentures, he must have moved his fair share of carcases.’
The lantern was swaying a few inches above the black and oily surface of the water.
‘Dear God,’ I cried. ‘What’s that?’
Something was moving on the water, something dark and glistening, something alive.
Milcote laughed. ‘It’s Alderley’s periwig, sir.’ He laughed again, and it seemed to me there was an edge of hysteria to his mirth. ‘What did you think it could be?’
‘I scarcely know.’
‘Shall I send Gorse or someone down again to fetch it?’
‘As far as I’m concerned, you can leave it there to rot.’
‘Someone will want it. It must be worth a few pounds.’
Milcote hauled up the lantern. ‘I wonder,’ he said, turning aside to drape the coil of rope over the hoist. ‘I believe that perhaps Alderley’s death was an accident after all.’