“No. Why? Does he like cakes?”
“He did. Before he died.”
“Died? You mean murdered?”
Geoffrey looked at her curiously. “No, I mean died. Why do you ask if he was murdered?”
Melisende shook her head impatiently. “Because that is what seems to obsess you. Murder. And you said you are investigating the murders of the knights, so I assume there must be a connection.”
Geoffrey could not fault her logic. “These cakes of yours,” he said, changing the subject. “Do you make them yourself?”
“I do not, as a matter of fact. My skills lie in bread, not cakes. These are made by my servant, Maria. Do you want to interrogate her here, or bear her off to the dungeons?”
“Here will do,” said Geoffrey. “Where is she?”
Melisende eyed him with disapproval, but called to a passing urchin to tell Maria Akira that a knight was waiting to speak with her.
“Akira? Is she a relative of Yusef Akira, the butcher?” And the man in whose shop the body of Brother Pius had been found, thought Geoffrey.
“We usually refer to Crusaders as butchers,” she retorted. “And Akira as a meat merchant.”
Was she fencing with him to gain time to think, or was she simply unable to resist the ample opportunities he gave her to insult him? he wondered.
“You have not answered my question.”
“Yes,” said Melisende with sudden exasperation. “She is his daughter. But they are estranged. He does not know she works for me, and I would rather you did not tell him. I might have known that thieving reprobate would be the kind of person with whom you would associate.”
“He is a very dear friend,” said Geoffrey. “He taught me everything I know.”
She glanced at him sharply and smiled reluctantly. “I suppose you met Akira because one of the priests was killed in his house. Like a knight was killed in mine. But of course he was not arrested and dragged off through a riot to the citadel prison.”
Geoffrey’s patience was beginning to wane. He decided he preferred to question witnesses when they were afraid of him, rather than when they clearly regarded him in the same light as a loathsome reptile. He glanced up the street, heaving with bakers and their customers, and conceded reluctantly that rearresting Melisende so that he might gain some honest answers from her was out of the question. Fate would be unlikely to deliver him from a furious mob a third time—although he was sorely tempted to put her under lock and key.
“It is interesting,” he said, turning back to face Melisende, “that Maria is connected to the deaths of John and Brother Pius because she is acquainted with both you and Akira.”
“So are half the people in this market,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand.
“Not to the same extent,” he said. “Akira is her father, and you are her employer.”
“So what?” she said with contempt. “That means nothing at all. Akira has other relatives: I employ one of them to tend my garden.”
That Melisende knew something about the murders was obvious to Geoffrey. How to prise it from her without causing a riot was less clear. A thought suddenly occurred to him.
“Was he blackmailing you? Dunstan?”
She gazed uncomprehendingly at him, eyes vivid in the sunlight. “What? Who is this Dunstan? And what could he blackmail me about?”
“All manner of things,” he replied with a shrug, seeing Roger walking toward him beaming broadly and proudly bearing someone on his arm. “Perhaps an unwanted birth, or selling undersized loaves to your customers, or a string of male visitors …”
She spun round, her hand moving fast to clout him around the face, but his reactions were quicker, and he caught her arm before it struck him. Her eyes flashed in fury, and she was shaking with rage.
“How dare you! How dare you say those things!”
“Oh, come mistress,” he said, maintaining his grip on her arm. “Do not pretend to be shocked. Here is your servant, Maria Akira, better known as Maria d’Accra to every knight in the citadel who knows his brothels.”
Roger reached Melisende’s stall and stood with Maria Akira’s delicate hand resting gently on his brawny arm. Melisende looked from Geoffrey, to Maria, and back to Geoffrey again. For once, she was at a loss for words.
“Good morning, Sir Geoffrey,” bubbled Maria Akira, flouncing up to him. “I did not know you were partial to cakes, or I would have brought you some.”
“I like cakes,” announced Roger loudly.
Maria looked up at him and giggled. “Then I shall see you have some next time.”
“Next time?” queried Melisende, finding her voice. “What is going on? Maria?”
Maria smiled prettily, while Geoffrey watched the exchange with interest.
“Maria is a favourite of all the knights at the citadel,” said Roger, making Maria blush modestly. “She works at Abdul’s Pleasure Palace on Friday nights.”
“And every other Saturday,” added Maria helpfully. “When I have time off from working for Mistress Melisende.”
Melisende’s jaw dropped, and Geoffrey began to laugh. Maria, ever fun-loving, laughed too, but Roger was unsure where the humour lay.
“Maria is very good,” he protested valiantly. “One of Abdul’s best. All the knights agree!”
Melisende’s jaw dropped further still, and she gazed at Maria in stupefaction. Geoffrey laughed helplessly, while Roger remained confused.
“How could you?” Melisende managed eventually, although whether her comment was addressed to Maria for being a prostitute, or to Geoffrey for laughing at her discomfiture, was unclear. “I no longer require your services,” she said coldly to Maria, before turning abruptly on her heel and striding away.
“No!” Maria was horrified. “I need this job! Abdul can only keep me two nights a week at most. What will I do?” She watched Melisende’s upright figure striding away down the alley, her dainty hands clasped at her throat. Maria gave Roger a hefty shove in the chest which made no impact at all. “This is your fault!” she wailed, and turned and fled.
“Catch her,” said Geoffrey to Roger, still struggling to bring his laughter under control. “Bring her back. I will talk to Mistress Prickly.”
With long strides, he caught up with Melisende who had made good progress down the alley, away from the market. She was rigid with anger and shock, and ignored him as he fell into step beside her.
“You should not abandon your shop,” he said gently. She stopped and spun round to face him, seeing the laughter still playing about in the depths of his green eyes, although his face was quite serious.
“Leave me alone! Every time you appear, trouble follows!”
“It is not my doing that your servant has other occupations in her spare time,” said Geoffrey reasonably. “As far as I know, she has worked for Abdul for several years. If this has not affected her service to you up until now, where is the problem?”
“Where is the problem?” she echoed in disbelief. She shook her head. “A typical Norman response! I am a respectable widow—or was. Now I have murders committed in my house, and I discover my faithful servant is a harlot in her spare time.” She turned from him, and Geoffrey saw tears glitter in her eyes.
“So that is not what Dunstan was blackmailing you about?”
She tipped back her head and took a deep breath. “No,” she said, once she had regained control of herself. “I was not being blackmailed. I know no one called Dunstan. And …”
“And?” he asked, seeing her hesitate.
“Dunstan,” she said, looking away. “A fat man with a tonsure?”
This was not a helpful description in a city where most monks ate well.
“Black, wiry hair, and a thin scar on his upper lip,” he supplied, trying to imagine Dunstan’s bloated features as they might have been before he had hanged himself.
“Yes,” she said, screwing up her face as she thought. “Yes. I think I do know a man of that description and name. Not
well. But he buys cakes from me from time to time.”
“When did he last buy them from you?”
She shook her head slowly. “I am not sure. Not this week.”
“He had some wrapped up in a parcel in his desk.”
She shrugged. “Many of our cakes are soaked in honey, which preserves them. He may have had them for a week or more, and they would still be perfectly all right to eat.”
“Did you prepare the packets of cakes for him in advance, or did you wrap them for him when he came to your stall?”
“The latter. He did not come on a regular basis. I imagine, like most people, he only came when he felt like eating cakes.”
“The cakes in his drawer were triangle-shaped with diamond patterns iced on them. There were perhaps ten of them in the one parcel.”
“Ten? Oh no. He did not buy that many. And he usually wanted a selection of different ones, not ones of the same kind.”
Geoffrey regarded her sombrely while he thought. Was she lying or telling him the truth? He had never experienced such difficulty in distinguishing lies from honesty before, and Melisende had him perplexed. The poisoned cakes were definitely from her stall: Geoffrey recognised them, and Melisende had sold cakes to Dunstan by her own admission. But did she poison them? Did Dunstan really buy different types of cake, or was she cleverly trying to throw him off the scent by confusing the issue? And had she only admitted to selling Dunstan cakes now because denying it would merely look suspicious in light of the evidence she must know he had?
“So now what do I do?” she said, regarding him as intently as he was studying her. “I have just lost a servant whom I considered a friend. I am hounded by the Advocate’s men because I was unfortunate enough to have had my house chosen as the scene of a murder, and now you think a fat clerk is blackmailing me because I sold him some cakes.”
“If you truly value Maria’s friendship, you will talk to her and come to some mutually acceptable agreement,” said Geoffrey after a moment’s thought. It seemed unfortunate that Maria should lose her job because of Roger’s indiscretion, although Maria seemed rather proud of her talents, and he wondered how Melisende could not have known. But Abdul’s Pleasure Palace was mainly stocked with Arab girls, and Maria was the only Greek. Perhaps that was why Maria had chosen to work for Abdul’s establishment. Even though the population of Jerusalem was small, the different communities were insular and tended to be exclusive, so Geoffrey supposed it was possible that the Greeks were unaware of Maria’s actions in an Arab-run brothel serving Crusader knights.
He began to walk with Melisende back toward the market. “Is there anything else you can tell me about Dunstan?”
“Nothing,” she replied with a shrug. “I have probably said too much already. I should have denied knowing him so that you would go away and leave me alone.”
“Then I will go away and leave you alone now Once again, thank you for your help. I am grateful we were able to speak without inciting a riot.”
Geoffrey gave a bow and left her, retracing his steps back up the alleyway toward the bakery, leaving her staring after him in confusion. He was arrogant, spoke with carefully chosen words, and knew exactly how to infuriate her without even raising his voice. Yet, there was more to him than most of the brutish knights who swaggered around the city, and Melisende could not condemn him for the single-mindedness of his enquiries when she possessed that exact same quality herself. She felt her anger evaporate as he rounded the corner. Although he was certainly not classically handsome, with his rugged features and his surcoat stained from innumerable battles, he possessed a certain strength of character and wry humour that made her hope that they would meet again—for bandying words with him was far more interesting than selling cakes in the market.
Roger had retrieved Maria, who sat weeping uncontrollably while he made clumsy attempts to soothe her. Geoffrey told her to talk to Melisende, and they took their leave. As they walked back up the street, a vision of Melisende’s mortified face came unbidden into his mind’s eye, and he began to laugh again. He had admirably resisted the urge to respond rudely to her jibes, he felt, but it had been gratifying to see this articulate, unfriendly woman at a loss for words. Roger shot him a mystified look, but said nothing until they rejoined Helbye, who gave Geoffrey a glare of such malevolence that the knight stopped dead in his tracks.
“Your vile dog has upset a baker’s stall and bitten two people,” Helbye growled. “It cost me a week’s pay, and those people are still livid. Look at them.”
Geoffrey looked and saw they were the object of attention that was far from friendly. The dog, knowing it had transgressed, lay on its side and raised a front paw, exposing its chest in submission. Geoffrey regarded it with exasperation. He wondered, not for the first time, how he had become encumbered with such a worthless, greedy, cowardly animal. He hoped Warner had not been right when he had said the dog recognised a kindred spirit.
“So to conclude,” said Hugh, pulling uncomfortably at the bandage that still swathed his skull, “the cakes came from Melisende Mikelos, but she thinks Dunstan did not buy them himself because he usually preferred a selection to ones all of the same kind. That statement could simply be a ruse to keep you from knowing that Dunstan bought the cakes and that she poisoned them.”
Geoffrey thought about what Huge was saying. His investigations had been brought to an abrupt halt when news came of a Saracen attack on a group of pilgrims on the Jerusalem to Jaffa road. Knowing that the Advocate was going to be travelling that way in the near future, a large contingent of knights and soldiers had ridden out to clear away any of the enemy. But by the time they arrived at the scene of the attack, the Saracens had long since disappeared back into the desert.
On their return, Geoffrey and his men had met Warner de Gray, who had been stricken with fever on his way to Jaffa with the Advocate’s advance guard; he was being returned to Jerusalem on a litter. Warner reported seeing horsemen riding in the distance toward Ibelin, so Geoffrey led a small party in hot pursuit. However, after two more gruelling days of riding through the desert, the horses began to fail. With the Sirocco blowing a fury and baking all in its path, and with his men worn out mentally and physically, Geoffrey turned his company around, and the men gratefully headed back toward Jerusalem.
Geoffrey had concentrated completely on the task at hand, and he had not allowed himself time to consider the mystery of the murders. He knew from bitter experience the dangers of allowing one’s mind to wander when in a land surrounded by hostile forces. So, upon his return after five days in the desert, he felt the need to review what he had learned of the mystery with Hugh and Roger. Now they lounged in the shade of the curtain wall mulling over what had happened before their recent excursion.
“I still cannot see why that Melisende was so appalled at Maria working for Abdul,” said Roger, not for the first time since their talk had begun. “She is very good.”
“So you told Melisende,” said Geoffrey. “I am sure your recommendation of Maria’s sexual prowess will go a long way in restoring her position as servant to a respectable widow.”
“Do you think so?” said Roger, pleased. “Good. I like Maria. I do not like Mistress Melisende, however. She is unpleasantly aggressive, like the Scottish women I meet on occasions at home. But that Maria …”
“Melisende must be involved in all this.” Hugh interrupted Roger’s eulogy before it became graphic. “There are too many coincidences for comfort. And you said you had the impression she was lying, or not telling you all she knew.”
“She was most definitely holding something back,” said Geoffrey. “Could she have killed poor John? She is aggressive enough certainly, and it requires no great strength to stab a man in the back. But then she must also have killed the others, for the method of murders has been identical in each case. And we are left with the conundrum of Loukas, killed while Melisende was talking to Tancred.”
“Perhaps she has an accomplice who killed to give
her an alibi,” said Hugh. “She seems a clever woman, and would easily be capable of arranging for another murder to be committed in the event of her arrest.”
“But if you are correct, it was very foolish of her to kill John in her own house,” said Geoffrey. “Why not in someone else’s house—like Akira’s again, or someone unconnected?”
“Perhaps she is more devious than you imagine,” said Hugh. “Perhaps she knew she might be traced through Dunstan’s cakes—if he ever ate them and died of poisoning—or that she might be connected to the murders through Akira, whose daughter works for her. Akira was never considered a suspect when a victim was found in his house—perhaps she assumed she would be regarded as an innocent bystander, like Akira was, if John’s body was discovered in her home.”
“It is a risky thing to do,” said Geoffrey. “Such a plan could go badly awry.”
“It did,” said Hugh. “Horribly awry. As she went through the motions of appalled revulsion for the benefit of the neighbours, she was unfortunate in her timing, for you happened to be going past. Instead of sending for the monks at the Holy Sepulchre—or even fat old Dunstan, her customer—she found herself confronted with a contingent of soldiers. You arrested her so that the Advocate could question her. She had miscalculated. The monks, who doubtless would have been far more sympathetic to a pretty and distraught widow, would never have arrested her. No wonder she loathes you. You seriously interfered with her carefully considered plans.”
“She might be a witch,” said Roger. “That would explain all this plotting and murdering. I would have her arrested again and let the Patriarch’s prison warders question her. They know how to get confessions from witches.”
“I am sure they do,” said Geoffrey. “But I would be happier with the truth than with some confession wrested out of her by the prison warders.” He thought hard. “But even if all our suppositions are correct—and we certainly have nothing to prove them—we are left with the problem of why. Why would a Greek widow feel the need to murder monks and knights and send poisoned cakes to Dunstan?”
01 - Murder in the Holy City Page 15