The coroner and his officer had examined it closely in Rougemont before leaving, the grisly object having spent most of the night in a corner of the garrison chapel of St Mary in the inner ward. The chaplain of the castle, a jovial Benedictine called Brother Rufus, had studied it with them, having an insatiable curiosity, especially about violent crime. 'Does the way it was cut off tell you anything?' he asked, as the three men crouched over the decapitated head, which lay on its left ear on the earthen floor. Unlike the cathedral priests, the padre seemed to have no qualms about desecrating his place of worship with such an object. 'It's just a ragged cut, which could have been done with anything-sharp,' opined Gwyn. De Wolfe agreed with him. 'The jagged edges are due to the skin wrinkling up as the blade is dragged across it. It was a keen knife, no doubt about it, for between the zigzags the cuts are very clean.' 'What about the bony part?' persisted Rufus. 'Could a knife cut through that as well?' John, still crouched on his haunches, picked up the head, turning it up so that the stump of the neck was uppermost.
