De Wolfe grunted. He was not much interested in the ships, but rather in their crews. 'That corpse must have been a seaman, dressed as he was,' he ruminated aloud. 'We should make some enquiries of some of these shipmasters.'
'Checking on gossip in the alehouses might be the quickest way,' suggested his officer, ever keen to find some excuse to enter a tavern. The only tavern John was keen to enter was the Bush in Exeter to see his mistress, but that was twenty miles away.
'You go, then, Gwyn; see what you can discover. I'll have words with a few of these shipmen and we'll meet in the village in an hour.'
With the Keeper still in tow, he loped back to the cog that was loading wool, as Gwyn vanished across the road to a shack that had a wilting bush hanging over the doorway. The blunt vessel was leaning a little towards him, but men were padding across from the storehouse over the road, each with a large bale of wool on his back, securely trussed with coarse twine.
As they clambered up the gangplank to the deck, a man in a russet tunic and green breeches stood at its foot, staring at each load and muttering to himself.
'Who's this fellow?' grunted de Wolfe.
'That's John Capie,' answered Luke de Casewold. 'He's the tally-man who reckons up the Customs dues though I suspect that far more gets past him than he records!' he added cynically.
John looked more closely and saw that the sallow-faced Capie had a long cord in his hands, which had a multitude of knots tied along its length. As each man hurried past with his burden, his fingers moved on another knot, his lips moving as he counted.
The coroner nodded in understanding. Now he knew how his own export taxes were calculated on the quaysides of Exeter and Topsham. The lucrative wool business he shared with Hugh de Relaga would be even more lucrative if they could avoid the Customs dues that the king's Council had imposed upon England in order to pay for the Lionheart's adventures overseas. Like de Casewold, he had his suspicions that not all the tax due on the bales that sailed out of the River Exe was actually declared, but this was something he did not wish to know about.
He looked up at the rising stern of the vessel and saw a burly man with a bushy red beard standing on the afterdeck. With his hands planted firmly on his hips, his posture suggested that he was the man in charge, as he glared at the procession of seamen and stevedores as if daring them to slow their efforts.
'That must be the shipmaster. I'll get up there and have a word with him,' grunted de Wolfe. He fitted himself into a gap between two men lugging bales up the plank and strode up to the deck, the Keeper following behind the next porter.
The man with the beard scowled at him as he approached.
'What do you want, sir?' he growled, though his habitual bluster was tempered by his recognition that this was a man of substance. The sombre but good-quality clothing and the expensive sword that swung at his hip told of wealth and authority.
'I am Sir John de Wolfe, the king's coroner for this county. Have you heard of the finding of a man's body near the village today?'
Impressed as he was by the rank of this law officer, the shipmaster remained surly. 'I have too much work here to listen to gossip,' he grunted.
'News of a strangled youth is somewhat more than gossip,' snapped de Wolfe. 'And this fellow appeared to be a shipman. We need to know who he is, so have you any of your crew missing?'
Red Beard shook his head. 'Half my men were paid off when I arrived yesterday. God knows where they are now. We only had one young 'un; he had hair the colour of wheat straw, if that's any help.'
As the dead boy's hair was almost black, this ruled him out, if the sullen shipmaster was telling the truth. The coroner climbed back down to the quayside and strode along the river, calling at each vessel and asking similar questions at every one of them. He had little but reluctant answers and surly shakes of the head, which made him suspect that there was a conspiracy of silence amongst these seamen.
'Not a very helpful bunch, are they?' he growled to Luke de Casewold as they finally reached the gateway into the village.
'Sailors are a strange lot; they stick together against the world, just like tinners,' observed the Keeper, who seemed to possess a philosophical streak.
'I got the feeling that they were hiding something from me,' grumbled John.
'They're like that with all law officers,' said Luke reassuringly. 'On principle, they are reluctant to give us even a 'good morning' if they can avoid it. Not that that's confined to shipmen; every damned man and woman in the hundred answers me grudgingly. Everyone has a guilty conscience about something!'
'What have these seafarers got to hide, then?' demanded de Wolfe.
As they entered the village, de Casewold sniggered. 'They are all crooked, Crowner! Smuggling is their main sin, though I'd not put a little piracy past some of them.'