The King's Investigator

By Howard of Warwick

Death in the Tower of London? This could give the place a bad reputation.

In King William’s new London fortress (so new it doesn’t have a tower yet), a dead body lies right outside his chamber door.
This could be murder as the victim is the widely hated Malf; so widely hated, virtually everyone is suspect.

Brother Hermitage, the King’s Investigator must be summoned; the King’s investigator who really doesn’t want to do the job at all anymore.

Fortunately, someone else seems very keen to take over: If you thought Brother Hermitage didn’t know what he was doing, Brother Peter is going to be a revelation.

But murder seems to be a routine feature of court intrigue:

Could it be a result of the dispute between the ghastly Le Pedvin, William’s favourite killer, and Ranulph de Sauveloy, his favourite administrator?
Could it be Malf’s own family, who really can’t wait for him to die until they inherit?
Could it be the Saxon rebels who are hiding in a very peculiar place close at hand?

Brother Hermitage, Wat the Weaver and Cwen have got to find out and as usual, it all goes wrong almost immediately. Find the killer or face the same fate themselves is a familiar old refrain.

But perhaps this time, Hermitage sees a way out. Could he really hand his hated job on to someone else; someone who really wants to do it?
Populated by old familiar faces from most of Hermitage’s nightmares, The King’s Investigator could be the very end....

... Although now we learn there's a Part II - how did that happen? - Look for the imaginatively titled, The King's Investigator Part II

Howard of Warwick’s mission to bring medieval crime comedy to people who didn’t know they wanted it, takes its nineteenth step.
Numerous No 1 Best Sellers, over 100,000 copies out there somewhere and containing more nonsense than a monk’s margin, it looks like it’s here to stay - or is it?

Previous volumes have garnered praise:

5* Another brilliant read
5* Another fun filled adventure
5* Ha, ha, ha! Aha! Brother Hermitage does it again.
5* Masterpiece from Howard
1* Silly.

"very good indeed, brilliant," BBC Coventry and Warwick

• Language: English
• Publisher: Howard of Warwick
• Release date: Oct 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781913383091

Howard of Warwick

Howard of Warwick is but a humble chronicler with the blind luck to stumble upon the Hermitage manuscripts; tales of Brother Hermitage, a truly medieval detective, whose exploits largely illustrate what can be achieved by mistake.Now an international best-seller with nearly a quarter of a million sales and a host of Number 1s, it only goes to show.Howard's work has been heard, seen and read, most of it accompanied by laughter and some of it by money. His peers have even seen fit to recognise his unworthy efforts with a prize for making up stories.The Chronicles of Brother Hermitage begin with The Heretics of De'Ath, closely followed by The Garderobe of Death and The Tapestry of Death.Howard then paused to consider the Battle of Hastings as it might have happened - but almost certainly didn't - and produced The Domesday Book (No, Not That One). More reinterpretations hit the world with The Magna Carta (Or Is It?)Brother Hermitage still randomly drifted through a second set of mysteries with Hermitage, Wat and Some Murder or Other: Hermitage, Wat and some Druids and Hermitage, Wat and Some Nuns.Just when you think this can't possibly go on: The Case of the Clerical Cadaver turned up followed by The Case of the Curious Corpse and now The Case of The Cantankerous Carcass.Now there are thirty of the things in various cubby holes all over the world.All the titles are also available as major books, with paper and everything. Try your local bookstore or www.thefunnybookcompany.com

Book preview

The King’s Investigator

by

Howard of Warwick

(The Unnecessary Chronicles of Brother Hermitage)

The Funny Book Company

Published by The Funny Book Company

Dalton House, 60 Windsor Ave, London SW19 2RR

www.funnybookcompany.com

Copyright © 2020 Howard Matthews

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, or distributed by any means whatsoever without the express permission of the copyright owner. The author’s moral rights have been asserted.

Cover design by Double Dagger.

ebook ISBN 978-1-913383-09-1

Scriptorial appreciation is due to:

Mary

Susan Fanning

Karen Nevard-Downs

Lydia Reed

Claire Ward

Also by Howard of Warwick.

The First Chronicles of Brother Hermitage

The Heretics of De'Ath

The Garderobe of Death

The Tapestry of Death

Continuing Chronicles of Brother Hermitage

Hermitage, Wat and Some Murder or Other

Hermitage, Wat and Some Druids

Hermitage, Wat and Some Nuns

Yet More Chronicles of Brother Hermitage

The Case of the Clerical Cadaver

The Case of the Curious Corpse

The Case of the Cantankerous Carcass

Interminable Chronicles of Brother Hermitage

A Murder for Mistress Cwen

A Murder for Master Wat

A Murder for Brother Hermitage

The Umpteenth Chronicles of Brother Hermitage

The Bayeux Embroidery

The Chester Chasuble

The Hermes Parchment

The Superfluous Chronicles of Brother Hermitage

The 1066 from Normandy

The 1066 to Hastings

The 1066 via Derby

Brother Hermitage Diversions

Brother Hermitage in Shorts (Free!)

Brother Hermitage’s Christmas Gift

Howard of Warwick’s Middle Ages crisis: History-ish.

The Domesday Book (No, Not That One.)

The Domesday Book (Still Not That One.)

The Magna Carta (Or Is It?)

Explore the whole sorry business and join the mailing list at

Howardofwarwick.com

Another funny book from The Funny Book Company

Greedy by Ainsworth Pennington

Caput I: A Sorry End

Caput II: Hermitage Gives It Up

Caput III: Death at Court

Caput IV: Call Out The Investigator

Caput V: Departure, Arrival and More

Caput VI: Two Faced Peter

Caput VII: Preliminary Conclusions

Caput VIII: The Day of The Dead

Caput IX: The King Must be Told

Caput X: A Word in Your Ear

Caput XI: More of a Rescue

Caput XII: Into Hiding

Caput XIII: Peter, Obviously

Caput XIV: Secret Mission

Caput XV: First Contact

Caput XVI: Hall to Hall Search

Caput XVII: Here’s a Plan

Caput XVIII: Up In The Roof

Caput XIX: Peter Pounces

Caput XX: Hostage Situation

Caput XXI: Old Faces

Caput XXII: Swimming Against The Tide

Caput XXIII: Together Forever

Caput XXIV: To The Tower

Caput XXV: Relatively Insane

Caput XXVI: Apprehended

Caput XXVII: Keeper Of The Keep

Caput XXVIII: That Aha Moment

Caput XXIX: The King’s Investigator

Caput I: A Sorry End

Lord Le Pedvin, right-hand man, confidant, liege man at arms and battlefield companion to King William of England, Duke of Normandy, was walking the corridors of the king’s London redoubt bearing a delivery of important parchment.

Every so often, he dropped his singular gaze to the bundle under his arm and wondered how it had come to this. It wasn’t so long ago the bundle under his arm would have been a dead Saxon; ah, those were the days. He even rubbed the patch that covered the space where his eye had been; the eye that had been lost in battle. That was the way to go.

The conquest itself had been wonderful, but that was what conquest was. An enemy bearing down upon you, weapons flying, your life resting on a single moment and a single movement. Defend, parry, respond, kill. And then do it again. And again, and again until the day was won.

And if the day wasn’t won? Well, that would be a glorious death. But all of Le Pedvin’s days had been won, hence he was still walking about while all those who had borne down on him, were not.

The ones who had fallen to his might were taken as much by surprise as anything. No one believed the cadaverous figure before them, who looked as if he had been killed in battle several weeks ago, could wield his sword with such horrible strength. Where on earth did all his might come from?

Battle made him feel light and almost giddy. After a day of hurling death in the faces of his enemies, as well as their backs and sides, he would embrace the warm glow of satisfaction, tired yet content.

Now, a few slips and rolls of parchment felt as if they were dragging him down into the depths of hell.

If he put the stuff on the floor and battered it with his sword for half an hour it would still get up and annoy him. A real enemy had the decency to stay down after they’d been hit enough times.

Surely, the idea of conquest was that you conquered your enemy, secured victory, took breath, and then went on to do it to someone else. There was always somewhere in the known world that needed conquering.

William seemed content to settle down to a reign of order, national reorganisation and consolidation; it was horrible.

He had even started on this building, which he seemed quite content would take about twenty years to complete. Twenty years! It only took a few days to stick a motte and bailey up; that had always been enough to frighten and control the locals in the past.

Now, William wanted a monument to his power. A Tower of London. There had never been a Tower of Normandy; why start now?

Get the locals to pile up a mountain of soil, plant a keep on top and use it as a base to ride out and sow some destruction.

The best they had managed from London was a few skirmishes to the north and west, where the barons were still troublesome. After a brief visit from the Norman forces they stopped being troublesome. If Le Pedvin had had his way they’d have stopped being barons as well; and would have had a lot less life about them.

But the king would negotiate, for heaven’s sake. He would take oaths of allegiance from people who were begging for their lives. They’d give an oath of allegiance to a duck if it had just taken their castle. Naturally, as soon as their backs were turned, the barons started rebelling again.

Le Pedvin regularly urged the king to embark on a full-scale move against the parts of the country that still resisted. There was nothing like a good few weeks of mostly senseless slaughter and mayhem to make life worth living.

Now, life comprised parchment, records, meetings, discussions and worst of all, the appalling Ranulph de Sauveloy practically in charge.

Rather than travel the length and breadth of the country slaughtering anything that moved, de Sauveloy wanted to find all the things that moved and count them. Then he was going to write them down in a book. A book, for God’s sake! The sheets of parchment on their own were bad enough; stick them together in a book and Lord knew where it would end.

Le Pedvin smiled his awful smile as he considered whether a nasty accident befalling Ranulph de Sauveloy might get the world back on an even keel. A particularly heavy book from a great height, perhaps?

William regularly urged his old friend to recognise that times had changed. Just think about it: they had conquered England, one of the wealthiest countries in the world. And now all that wealth was theirs. What was the point of conquest if you didn’t heap the spoils of victory upon yourself?

If the locals were doing their level best to hide the spoils from their new owners, William needed to find where it all was. Then he could tax these wretched Saxons to death.

Taxing people to death? What sort of life was that for a man of action? Instead of getting out there with sword in hand, you sent a tax man to be mean to people until they withered and died of their own accord. Pathetic.

Mind you, William was getting on; perhaps that was it. Thoughts of his own mortality might be bearing down on him; he was nearly forty, after all.

All of these familiar thoughts nagged at Le Pedvin as he delivered these latest reports to William. To his mind, a report should be delivered in a croaking voice by a dying man on horseback, not by dropping some parchment onto the king’s desk.

Thoughts of dropping parchment must have taken control of his arm, as the load he was carrying slipped from his grasp and fell to the flagstone floor.

He stopped and looked at it. His strongest urge was simply to leave it there and walk away. If parchment was so clever, let it deliver itself.

He sighed as he acknowledged that he would never hear the end of it. De Sauveloy would ask where the important reports were, the king would back him up, and Le Pedvin would have to go and get them.

And they would turn out to be really important; after all, it was vital to know how many ploughs there were in Newington, wasn’t it?

Just to satisfy his personal discontent, he accidentally kicked the parchment down the corridor a short way.

‘Allow me, my lord,’ a voice simpered out of the stonework and a monk appeared, seemingly from nowhere.

‘What the devil?’ A surprised Le Pedvin asked.

‘Oh, do forgive me, my lord. I didn’t mean to startle you.’

‘It takes more than a monk to startle me.’

‘Brother Peter.’ The monk bowed obsequiously.

‘Why?’ Le Pedvin asked, which seemed to confuse Brother Peter.

‘Erm, that’s the name given to me upon my taking Orders.’ Brother Peter clearly thought the Norman would understand things like that.

‘No, I mean why are you telling me?’

‘Aha.’ Peter chanced a smile but seemed to realise that keeping his mouth shut would be best.

He skipped down the corridor to the pile of parchment and scooped it up. As he did so, he briefly looked at each sheet before putting it the right way up and the right way round. Then he patted them into shape and shuffled them until all the edges were neatly aligned.

Le Pedvin sighed. This was the new order then. Monks organising parchment, de Sauveloy reading it, and William putting his seal on it. And none of it fought back.

Peter held out the neat and well-ordered stack for Le Pedvin.

‘You can carry them,’ Le Pedvin said. ‘Monks like that sort of thing.’

‘Erm, yes, my lord. I’d be delighted, my lord. Any service I can offer, of course.’

‘Of course.’ Le Pedvin took that for granted.

Any question of who this Peter was, what he was doing here and why he was prowling around corridors on his own just waiting to pick up fallen parchment, were of such interest to Le Pedvin that they didn’t even enter his head. The world was full of monks and parchment so it should be no surprise that you couldn’t walk ten yards without tripping over one.

‘Come.’ Le Pedvin beckoned as he continued his walk. It felt better to have someone bearing his load for him. He briefly wondered whether this man might be a Saxon in disguise who had inveigled his way in just to attack and kill a high-ranking Norman; that would be nice.

No, it would be some ordinary monk fawning over a bit of parchment. Why did monks always fawn over parchment? Another mystery in which he had not the slightest interest.

A sigh escaped him as he realised who this monk was. Another example of William’s slow decline from fighting monarch to something far less appealing.

‘What are you doing here?’ Le Pedvin asked without looking.

‘Aiding and abetting, my lord,’ Peter almost dribbled the words. ‘Aiding and abetting.’

‘What the devil does that mean?’

‘Oh, erm, aid means to…,’

‘I know what aiding means.’ It would be obvious even to the stonework that Le Pedvin’s mood was falling from gloomy discontent to something much darker.

‘Abet is from the Latin, my lord.’

‘It would be.’

‘The Latin and the French. Abeter, to urge on, support, perhaps?’

‘And who are you urging on now?’

‘You, my lord.’

Le Pedvin turned his face to the monk and it was a sobering sight.

‘Or not, my lord,’ Peter suggested.

The face turned away.

‘Does the king know you’re here?’

‘The, the, king, my lord?’ Peter sounded alarmed at this question. Alarmed and slightly excited.

‘Of course.’

‘Erm, I wouldn’t know, my lord.’

Le Pedvin sounded very suspicious, which immediately put a great worry on Peter’s face. ‘Did he send for you?’

‘Send for me, my lord?’

‘Again?’

Peter stumbled through his reply. ‘I, er, don’t think that his majesty has, erm, that is to say.’

‘Ha,’ Le Pedvin crowed. ‘Still an idiot, I see.’

Peter obviously thought silence was the best answer to this.

As he followed along behind Le Pedvin, his expression clearly said that he did not have a clue what was going on here. It seemed that Le Pedvin had mistaken him for someone else but there were two reasons not to contradict the Norman.

One: contradicting Norman nobles was generally unwise. Harold had tried to do it near Hastings and it had not gone well for him. Anyone who followed the same path tended to find themselves at a quite similar destination. Whatever a Norman noble said to you, they were right. The fact that they might be wrong was irrelevant.

Two: this mistake of identity seemed to be leading to the king. Peter’s hesitancy was understandable; being taken before the king was the last thing that ever happened to quite a lot of people. On the other hand…,

If ever a face could be described as having a scheming look upon it, Brother Peter would be the reference against which to judge. Concern and confusion were despatched and such machinations as man is made of took their place.

It seemed that all the features of his face were suddenly engaged in an animated discussion. The eyes popped about as if anxious to escape their confines. The nose twitched and the mouth contorted itself into a silent exposition of hideous complexity.

Even the fingers joined in, writhing themselves like eels in a bucket.

Fortunately, Le Pedvin’s back was turned; he’d have thought the monk was having a fit of some sort.

‘Right,’ Le Pedvin announced as they arrived at a pair of closed doors. ‘Here we are.’ His voice sank under the weight of resignation to the inevitable.

He didn’t knock or wait on any ceremony but turned the crude iron handle and pushed the doors open. It was simply assumed that Peter would follow him into the room.

The interior was just as Le Pedvin had expected and so his resignation swam happily in the depths of his disappointment.

The king was there, but that was the only bright point. De Sauveloy ruined the ambience; the fact that the two of them were sitting at a table considering yet more parchment was like the last corpse in a battle; there was now nothing to look forward to.

‘Ah,’ King William looked up and welcomed Le Pedvin. Either that, or he was welcoming yet more parchment.

De Sauveloy said nothing, but that was expected. How that man had managed to survive all the trials and tribulations of a major military conflict was a mystery. The biggest surprise was that no one on his own side had killed him.

He described his function as offering guidance and direction to the best of his ability.

Others saw it as interminable, unwanted and unwelcome criticism of just about everything they did; the criticism of a man who has read one book on how to do whatever it is he’s talking about. Not only that, it was delivered in a patronising tone, almost always at the most inappropriate moment.

At the battle near Hastings he’d roundly castigated most of the fighting men for not battling properly; the stables for their incompetent care of horses; and the weapons-master for allowing his blades to blunt too quickly when they hit a Saxon or two.

Worst of all, he seemed to have absolutely no awareness that his prattling condescension was raising people’s ire to the point where it could fall on him and crush him to death. It was only his value to the king as an organiser and planner that delayed the inevitable.

Many in the Norman army looked forward with dread to the day when William himself might fall. He was a king who got in the middle of battle and so the risk was high. The only bright spot of such an awful event would be that they could finally kill Ranulph de Sauveloy; slowly.

Le Pedvin was mostly immune to the man’s awful presence, mainly because de Sauveloy knew that the king valued Le Pedvin more highly than any. He would forgive his favourite anything, even if it were alleviating Ranulph’s neck from the bother of keeping his head on top.

He tried his best to ignore the whining irritation that buzzed in his ears like a wasp in a dark room; but sometimes it was hard.

On a secret mission for the king, he had even been forced to travel the length of the country in the company of the appalling man. All that experience had achieved was to cement his contempt in a block so solid, Druids could dance around it.

Now that William was taking the rule of his new realm so seriously, there was a real danger that de Sauveloy would usurp his position.

Such court intrigue did not disturb Le Pedvin. Intrigue tended to die when you stuck a sword in it.

‘Come, come,’ William beckoned enthusiastically. ‘We’re just discussing the distribution of under-tenancies in the shires north of the Thames.’

Le Pedvin’s sigh released a volume of air that an observer might think was all the breath keeping him alive.

‘Ah,’ Ranulph’s voice nagged the sigh aside. ‘Are those the reports of plough holdings? I’ve been waiting for those.’

There was nothing left for Le Pedvin to do but sag under the revelation that his worst thoughts about the pointlessness of his delivery had turned out to be true.

Peter scurried forward at Ranulph’s imperious beckoning and laid the parchment on the table with an obsequious bow.

De Sauveloy did notice this, so few people bowed to him at all. They did make a variety of other gestures though, which was something he’d been meaning to raise with the king.

Peter was graced with a slight rise of the de Sauveloy eyebrows.

‘My lord,’ Peter continued to bow and moved backwards in a rather sickening manner.

Unfortunately, he retreated so far that he came within range of Le Pedvin and received a kick in the backside, which got him standing straight again.

‘He’s not a lord,’ Le Pedvin pointed out. ‘He’s de Sauveloy.’

‘We’ve just been considering that as well,’ William said, apparently without noticing the animosity that had drawn up a chair and was making itself comfortable. ‘I’m thinking of Shropshire.’

‘What about it?’ Le Pedvin had to ask.

‘For de Sauveloy.’

Le Pedvin scowled, which he did very well indeed. ‘I thought you’d already promised that to Roger de Montgomery.’

‘Oh, yes.’ William reconsidered the allocation. Roger de Montgomery was one of the few men intelligent enough to arrange a little accident for Ranulph and come out of it as innocent as a new-born babe gambolling with extra-woolly, wide-eyed lambs. ‘We’ll think again,’ he promised Ranulph, who nodded with some disappointment.

Little triumphs were just as good as big ones to Le Pedvin’s mind.

William seemed to notice that someone else was in the room. ‘Got yourself a monk, then,’ he said to Le Pedvin as if congratulating him on coming round to the modern way of the world and acquiring the correct accoutrements.

‘He’s not mine, he’s yours.’

William frowned. ‘What did you get me a monk for? I’ve already got dozens.’

‘I didn’t get him. He’s yours already. You know.’

William now did give Peter a gaze, which the Brother returned with a sycophancy that was almost liquid.

‘Really?’ William was obviously trying to remember whether this was one of his monks.

‘The what-do-you-call-it. I thought you’d sent for him.’

‘What do you call it?’ William asked.

Le Pedvin searched for the word. ‘Investigator, that’s it.’

The king peered hard at Peter, who surrendered to the examination. ‘No, it isn’t.’

‘What?’

‘That’s a completely different monk. Not the same one at all.’

Le Pedvin considered Peter with new-found contempt as if he’d brought a monk in on the sole of his shoe. ‘They all look alike to me.’

‘You’re not the King’s Investigator,’ William told Peter. ‘What are you doing here?’

Peter managed the remarkable feat of prostrating himself while standing up. ‘I am simply at your service, Majesty,’ he simpered. ‘In any way you see fit. I just happened to be passing and was able to carry the parchment for my lord here.’ He bowed sideways and forwards at the same time.

‘Hm,’ the king grumbled.

‘Do you read and write, monk?’ de Sauveloy asked.

‘Oh yes, my lord.’ Peter used the title incorrectly, and deliberately.

‘I might be able to use him,’ Ranulph said to William.

‘Have him then.’ The problem was dismissed and Peter scurried round to stand at de Sauveloy’s beck and call.

Le Pedvin shook his head and left the room. The next person he bumped into was going to wonder what on earth they’d done wrong.

In a quiet moment, as de Sauveloy was sorting through the newly arrived parchment and handing it to Peter one sheet at a time, the monk chanced an inconsequential question, just to establish some sort of working relationship.

‘The King’s Investigator, eh?’ he said. ‘From the Latin, vestigare, to track? A grand role, no doubt. It sounds absolutely fascinating.’

Caput II: Hermitage Gives It Up

Young Brother Hermitage, the incumbent King’s Investigator, albeit a reluctant one, would have been overjoyed to learn that Le Pedvin couldn’t tell him apart from any other monk in the land.

Too many of his nights had been disturbed by visions of the Norman simply appearing in his room, or from behind a tree, or out of the sky, or even, on one very disturbing night put down to strong cheese before bed, from inside the beak of a giant armoured thrush.

The thought that the Normans had giant birds from which they descended upon an unsuspecting populace remained entirely believable for the whole of the following morning. Eventually, he convinced himself that it was nonsense. He had been close to the king and Le Pedvin on many occasions and massive thrushes would be difficult to hide.

Seeing his reflective mood, Wat the Weaver and Cwen had asked how he was on several occasions that day, but he was reluctant to answer. They had their own tasks to get on with, and when he lined up the words to let them out, he couldn’t help but think they sounded a bit odd.

Cwen would need to be in the workshop as soon as there was enough light for work. Tapestries didn’t make themselves, she would say; and apprentices didn’t make them either unless she goaded them into action.

The fact that the weaving master, Hartle, was there was not sufficient, apparently. He was fine when it came to the practical aspects of weaving, but goading was not one of his strengths; it was one of Cwen’s.