Absolution by Murder

Начало книги

The man had not been dead long. The blood and spittle around his twisted lips had not even dried. The body swung to and fro in the faint breeze, suspended at the end of a stout hemp rope from the branch of a squat oak tree. The head was twisted at an awkward angle where the neck had been broken. The clothes were torn and if the man had worn sandals then they had since been taken by scavengers for there was no sign of any footwear. The contorted hands, still sticky with blood, showed that the man had not died without a struggle.

It was not the fact that a man had been hanged on a crossroad tree that caused the small party of travellers to halt. The travellers had become used to witnessing ritual executions and punishments since they had crossed from the land of Rheged into the kingdom of Northumbria. The Angles and Saxons who dwelt there seemed to live by a harsh code of penalties for those who transgressed their laws, from an assortment of mutilations of the body to execution by the most painful means devised, the most common and humane being by hanging. The sight of one more unfortunate suspended on a tree no longer troubled them. What had caused the party to draw rein on their mounts, an assortment of horses and mules, was something else.

Читать дальше →