The Sticklepath Strangler (2001) Read Online Free Page B

it like a staff, he
limped to the door, then lurched on outside shouting for his Meg. It was there, before his threshold, that the three arrows found their marks.
    One smashed straight into his shoulder, the heavy arrowhead spinning him around, making him drop his bow and stumble to the ground. He had just propped himself up on his good arm to face his
tormentors when the second arrow flashed into his neck and flew through it, thudding on into the cottage wall. He coughed once, and even as he drew breath to cough again, the last arrow slammed
into the left side of his breast, straight into his heart.
    Just before he died, Athelhard used his remaining strength to scream one last defiant curse. All the men heard him; all would remember it for the rest of their lives.
    ‘
Damn you! Damn you all! I’ll see the whole vill roast in hell! You are all accursed!
’
    Later, much later, Serlo the Warrener walked down into the clearing. He took in the smoking shell of the house and eyed the smouldering corpse which lay just inside the doorway
where the departing men had thrown it, to be consumed by the flames.
    A dead body was nothing to Serlo; he had handled enough of them in his time, although he had never burned one. That looked wrong. It was one thing to bury a man after listening to his
confession, letting him answer the questions of the
viaticum
and giving him absolution, but to slaughter a man like this was repellent.
    He shrugged and turned away; a man of few words has little need of contemplation, and for the present he had one pressing consideration.
    The girl knelt not far from the wreck of her house, her eyes wild, her mouth dribbling. Her round face was enough to show that her mind was addled, and it was that which saved her, of course.
Serlo knew that the superstitious folk of the vill wouldn’t harm a girl like her. She was touched.
    He gently crouched before her, blocking her view of her brother’s corpse, and clasped her hands in his. It took a long time, much talking, a lot of reassuring and comforting, but at last,
as the dawn lighted the eastern horizon, she complied with his gentle urging and went with him up to his house.

 
Chapter One
    Seven years later
    Joan bolted up the track as though the hounds of hell were snapping at her heels. Splashing through the ruts and puddles, she could feel the mud spattering her calves and thighs
underneath her skirts, the brambles catching at her sleeves.
    Gasping, she paused at the top of the steepest part of the hill, gripping her sides and facing back the way she had come. There, far below her, she could see her red-faced friend Emma panting
and waving up at her. Soon Emma had recovered and set off again, pressing her palms on her thighs with each step as though it could ease her progress.
    Emma was too chubby, that was why she struggled to keep up with Joan, not that either minded. Joan was fond of her friend, and Emma was devoted to Joan. There were few other girls in the area
and although with Joan’s fertile imagination she could populate the surrounding ten miles with different inhabitants, it was nice not to have to bother, and Emma had a similar sense of fun to
her own. She was a good companion.
    It was terribly steep here – Joan could recall her father telling her that ‘stickle’ meant steep – but now that they had climbed the sharper incline at the bottom of
Greenhill, the slope rose less cruelly, taking them through the trees to the scrubby land above the vill.
    From here she could see right over the clump of small cottages and the Reeve’s own larger house, to the river and then the hill which stood between Sticklepath and South Zeal.
    She loved this view. Below her she could just glimpse her own family’s home, a large cottage at the edge of the vill under the hill that led up to the moors, a good-sized house for her and
her parents. Behind was the mill, whose crunching and rumbling could be heard even over the steady rushing of the