Read 4 A Plague of Angels: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery Online
Authors: P. F. Chisholm
Tags: #rt, #Mystery & Detective, #amberlyth, #MARKED, #Fiction, #Historical
4 A Plague of Angels: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (40 page)
‘What makes you think he’d want to?’
‘Och God, he was telling and telling me all about how Robert Greene was stopping him at his poetry-writing and how he hated his guts. I think I may even have advised him to…er…kill the man.’
Carey reached into the breast pocket of his doublet and pulled out a chased silver flask. ‘Remember this?’ he said. ‘Robert Greene’s flask. He had it on him when we found him and he was drinking from it most of the night. He got it refilled by the tapster with aqua vitae and no doubt drank some more on his way home and for a nightcap before he went to bed. The next morning he sickened and died.’
‘Ay but it could ha’ been the eels,’ Dodd pointed out from sheer perversity while Carey smoked.
‘Could have been,’ said Carey and sighed. ‘Only it wasn’t. Barnabus and Simon didn’t have plague. Heneage sent men to capture me and found only Simon, with Barnabus already dead the same way as Greene.’
‘How d’ye ken that?’
‘I broke into my lodgings.’
Dodd winced at this plain admission of madness. ‘But are ye sure it wisnae plague?’ he asked on a rising note of panic.
‘Certain. We found Simon trussed up like a chicken with Tamburlain roosting on the bed and Barnabus…Well, it was easily recognisable, what he’d died of. And under Barnabus’s pillow, I found this flask.’
Dodd narrowed his eyes. It took him a while, thanks to his wooziness, but he worked it out. ‘Och, Barnabus and his light fingers.’
‘Precisely,’ said Carey giving him back the pipe. ‘I’ve told him thousands of times that his habit of thieving whatever didn’t belong to me and wasn’t nailed down would kill him in the end, and it did. But it’s certain there was poison in the flask, for there was nothing wrong with Barnabus before and he didn’t have plague.’
‘So yon Shakespeare killed both Robert Greene and Barnabus?’
‘I think so.’
‘Can ye prove it?’
Carey shook his head. ‘I’ve nothing but suspicion. Shakespeare had the chance to put poison in Greene’s flask—that doesn’t prove he did it. And he can’t have known in advance what Barnabus would do, so he’s hardly to blame there.’
‘Will ye ask him?’
‘I got hold of him while the doctor and the surgeon were seeing to you and Edmund. I think hearing he’d killed Barnabus by accident shook him a bit, but then he denied everything, the whole boiling lot and challenged me to arrest him for it.’
‘Ay, well, he would.’
‘Of course he would.’
‘Och.’ Dodd was shaking his head, more in amusement than disapproval, ‘I’ve allus said ye cannae trust poets.’
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents