Hugh Corbett 15 - The Waxman Murders by Paul Doherty Read Free Book Online Page A

introduced himself and led them along a narrow path, still buried deep under snow, up the main steps and into the manor hall. The rest of the retinue hung back. Castledene went forward, followed by Wendover, Ranulf and Chanson. As Corbett entered, he gazed around and gasped. He had experienced all forms of horror: he had wandered battlefields where the dead lay thick like some blood-coated robe strewn across God’s earth; he’d stumbled over corpses hacked and cut, past cadavers swinging from trees, eloquent witness of man’s cruelty to man; he’d ridden through villages annihilated like any City of the Plain in the Old Testament, where cottages and houses were blackened shells and the wells were crammed to the brim with the blue-black remains of the decomposing dead.
    Maubisson Hall, however, possessed a unique, frightening dreadfulness. At first glance the chamber was an exquisitely comfortable one, with dais, tables, benches and chairs; tapestries and coloured stiffened cloths hung against the walls. Candlelight glittered from precious vessels, whilst smoke still curled from the mantled hearth and the air was faintly sweet with the odours of cooking. These just emphasised the hideousness of the corpses: silent, twisting shadows hanging by their necks, held tight by thick tarred rope. Dangling from ugly iron brackets driven into the wall, the corpses were suspended like half-empty sacks; legs, feet, arms and hands trailing, heads slightly turned as if peering into the darkness beyond.
    Corbett ignored the exclamations of those around him and walked across. He studied the stout L-shaped brackets, pieces of iron hammered into the wall either side of the shuttered windows from which lanterns could be slung. Near each corpse a stool or chair had been pushed away. Corbett had seen enough hanged men and women to last him a thousand lifetimes: corpses blacker than charcoal, cavities carved from their eyes by yellow-beaked crows, faces pitted and holed by kites, hollow bones rattling beneath tattered rags. In contrast the Maubisson corpses seemed almost alive, except for those half-open glassy eyes, gaping mouths and protuberant tongues.
    ‘An entire family,’ he murmured.
    ‘Where is Servinus?’ Castledene exclaimed. ‘Their bodyguard? He’s not here!’
    Corbett only half heard him, eyes straining up through the darkness. He wanted to catch the expressions on those dead faces, to remember their ghastliness so that when he began to pursue their assassin he would never forget, show no mercy, offer no pardon.
    He stepped back. ‘Cut them down!’ He gestured at Ranulf, shaking his head in an attempt to clear from his mind the nightmare image of his own family in such a hideous situation. ‘For God’s sake, man!’ he added to Castledene. ‘This is an abomination! Have them cut down.’
    They all helped. Tables, chairs and stools were pushed close, daggers drawn. Corbett tried to ignore the hiss of trapped air from the corpses as the nooses round their necks were cut. At length all four – Paulents, his wife, their son and their young flaxen-haired maid – lay side by side on the floor.
    ‘I’ve sent for Parson Warfeld from St Alphege’s,’ Castledene declared, ‘as well as the city physician Peter Desroches. They’ll both be here soon.’
    Corbett crouched at the feet of the row of corpses. Paulents’ face was slightly contorted; his wife and son and the maid looked as if they were asleep: so young, yet they were all marred by that gruesome purple-blue circle round their throats, the strange colour of their skin, the way their lips appeared swollen. Corbett tried to ignore the dead faces as he carefully inspected wrists and nails, the backs of hands and heads, sniffing at parted lips. He pressed his hand against Paulents’ face, then felt the muscles of the shoulder, chest and stomach.
    ‘They must have been dead some hours,’ he declared. ‘At least to my reckoning, their corpses are beginning to