Land of the Silver Dragon

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A murder seems a hundred times more shocking when you know the victim. It seems to make the danger personal.

It is an exaggeration to say I knew Utta of Icklingham: more accurately, I knew who she was. She was my sister Goda’s mother-in-law, and, although one should not speak ill of the dead, by common consent she was a shrew of a woman and no great loss.

Word of the drama first reached us in Aelf Fen via the peddler who regularly wheels his barrow from village to village. Icklingham is about six miles away, and by the time he reached us, the peddler had already told his tale to several groups of wide-eyed people in the hamlets and settlements dotted along his route.

‘They say a great, fair, red-bearded giant of a feller burst into the house,’ the peddler announced, gazing round at his audience with a face twisted into a rictus of horror. ‘And, lacking a single drop of Christian charity in his stone of a heart, he set about breaking every pot and every stool, chair, bed and board in the place!’ Peddlers, I have observed, tend towards the dramatic when they tell a tale. ‘Not that they had much,’ this particular peddler added prosaically. ‘It was a poor sort of a household.’

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