The coroner left the bailiff, the parish priest and portreeve together in the house and walked with his assistants and the Keeper of the Peace back to the church. Here Gwyn stripped the clothing from the corpse and, together with John, examined it closely from head to toe. The young man was slim but had plenty of muscle in his arms and legs. His dark hair was plastered to his scalp and forehead by the dampness of his makeshift grave, but there was nothing abnormal to be seen apart from the ligature mark around the neck and the clear signs of strangulation in the face. Gwyn searched the scanty clothing and found nothing useful. 'No belt or pouch, not a coin or badge to help us,' he muttered, as for the sake of decency he pulled the garments back over the corpse.
'How long would you say he's been dead?' ruminated de Wolfe. 'A few days?' He often had a contest with his officer, both reckoning themselves experts in all aspects of death.
'His death stiffness has passed off. It was cool in that grave, but I doubt he was croaked earlier than about Saturday.'
It was now Tuesday, and de Wolfe nodded his agreement. He turned to Thomas, who was hanging about outside the mortuary shed, still queasy about dead bodies even after a year and a half as coroner's clerk.
'There's nothing to write on your roll until we hold the inquest, so I suggest you find Father Henry again and see if he has any useful village gossip. You are usually good at wheedling information from your fellow clerics.' Thomas wandered off, not sure whether the coroner's remark was a compliment or a jibe.
When Gwyn had covered up the corpse again, still lying on the fish-barrow, they began walking towards the quayside. Luke de Casewold still strode alongside them, as John was unable to shake him off. He could hardly order a fellow law officer to go away, especially as this was an obvious murder on the Keeper's own territory. No one seemed quite clear how far the functions and powers of these new officials extended, as far as de Wolfe could make out; only a few knights had been appointed around the country on a somewhat random basis, depending on who could be persuaded to take on the job. Like the coroners, they were unpaid, with expenses doled out from the sheriff's funds, but no salary. The trio walked out through the other town gate, just beyond the church. Here the road turned sharply to the left and carried on along the water's edge, where, on their right, half a dozen ships were settling on to the mud as the tide receded. On the landward side, there was a narrow belt of land under the loom of the large ridge above the estuary. Here were more cottages and taverns, as well as barn-like buildings with thatched or stone-tiled roofs.
'These are storehouses for goods either brought in or waiting to be loaded on to the ships,' said Luke helpfully. 'Though that one is the fish market.'
He pointed to an open-fronted shed where a dozen men and women were gutting fish and dropping them into baskets. The estuary here was wide and open to the sea, and on the other side the villages of Seaton and Fleet also had small ships beached along their banks. Nearer the sea, which shimmered in the distance in the early-afternoon sun, John could see pebble and shingle banks around a tiny island set off the shore at Seaton.
As they walked, John saw that some parts of the water's edge had been strengthened by stone, forming wharves where the cogs could be tied up at high tide and supported when it dropped, so that loading and unloading could be carried on more easily. Elsewhere, at low tide, the vessels leant over a little on their keels, but still the crew and other labourers managed to hurry up and down planks laid to the shore with their sacks, bales and kegs. It was a busy scene, with some of the cargoes being stacked on the ground or loaded into the many ox-carts that trundled back and forth. Still more was being moved in and out of the warehouses on the other side of the track, and John was particularly interested in one that was half filled with bales of wool. Many of these were being carried across the road to a larger ship, to be stacked in the single hold that gaped in the middle of her deck.
The tall, gaunt figure of the king's coroner received many curious stares from both the porters and seamen. His hunched figure, dressed all in black, was an unusual sight on a harbour wharf, especially as he was accompanied by a ginger giant with a large sword. The Keeper of the Peace aroused no interest, as he had been a frequent and usually unwelcome visitor to Axmouth since his appointment.
They walked the length of the quayside and continued for almost half a mile down to where the estuary met the open sea, beneath the cliffs of the headland rising on their left. It was a calm day, and only low waves rippled in across the wide harbour mouth, petering out as they travelled upstream.
'This place would look mightily different in a westerly gale,' observed Gwyn, his maritime past making him a confident expert. 'But these vessels would be safe enough, especially if they moved further upriver if it got really rough.'