01 - Murder in the Holy City

by Simon Beaufort

  Abdul’s establishment comprised a large room on the ground floor, with a maze of small rooms on the upper floor that might be hired for private use. But it was the lower-floor room that boasted the action. A trio of sweating musicians pounded out a cacophony of noise, the rhythm of which was mesmeric. Over the din, men yelled and laughed as they enjoyed the company of the women. Geoffrey remembered Roger’s words about how he preferred women who spoke his own language, and he wondered whether Abdul’s music was deliberately loud so that the knights would not realise the women did not understand a word they said.

  Abdul’s Pleasure Palace was exclusively for knights: lesser soldiers, no matter how much booty they might produce, were simply not allowed inside. Abdul employed several hulking men whose strength was reputed to be prodigious, whose dual purpose was to ensure no one was admitted who should not be there and to collect appropriate payment from the knights. There were probably about thirty knights, mainly Normans, in the lower room, and about the same number of women. The women were scantily clad, as women in brothels generally were in Geoffrey’s experience, and the knights wore bizarre combinations of chain mail and undergarments.

  Geoffrey sipped wine from a handsome jewelled cup and watched the revellers. He looked for Maria, but she was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps Melisende had accepted her back on the condition that she give up her alternative career. A knight lunged drunkenly past and stumbled over Geoffrey’s feet. He struggled to stand, decided it was too much effort, and went to sleep where he lay. Others around the room were in a similar condition, sprawled in chairs with their heads back and mouths open, or face down on the tables. In the morning, most would clearly have only the haziest of memories of their night out, and Geoffrey despaired. How could he possibly expect reliable answers about the whereabouts of Warner and d’Aumale from this crowd? And tonight was a normal one, whereas the evening in question had been a party, doubtless far more rowdy and drunken than it was now.

  Abdul slithered up to him, rubbing his oiled hands together and giving a leer with curiously white teeth. Geoffrey wondered if they had been applied with whitewash.

  “You look sad, my friend,” Abdul said greasily, his eyes looking anywhere but at Geoffrey. “Perhaps I can bring you someone who might cheer you up?”

  “Is Maria d’Accra here?”

  Abdul’s expression became predatory. “She might be. But her mother has been ill, and she has seven brothers and sisters to feed and … that should help, thank you sir.” As Abdul did a disappearing trick with the coins, Geoffrey followed him through the tangle of gyrating bodies to the stairs on the other side of the room, ignoring Roger’s indiscreet waves and winks.

  Abdul led the way up the stairs and along several narrow corridors, before asking Geoffrey to wait in a small vestibule lined with benches. A few moments later, a young man slunk past, casting resentful eyes at Geoffrey, and Abdul returned, rubbing his hands together like a fly. He beckoned Geoffrey to follow him until he stopped outside a door with a handsome inlay of green marble. As Abdul prepared to open the door, Geoffrey grabbed his arm.

  “Were Warner de Gray and Henri d’Aumale here six nights ago?”

  Abdul looked startled; then his eyes narrowed craftily. “Everyone was here that night, Sir Geoffrey,” he said. “But perhaps my memory might be jogged if I were not so concerned about my sick mother …”

  “Is there anyone in this Palace without a sick mother?” asked Geoffrey, handing over more coins.

  The coins were quickly bitten and secreted away somewhere on Abdul’s oily person. “Warner and d’Aumale were here,” he said.

  “All night?”

  “They arrived after dark and left in the small hours.”

  “When, exactly?”

  Abdul spread his hands. “I do not remember. There were probably a hundred knights here then. I cannot recall them all. Sir Warner and Henri d’Aumale were here, and I remember they left after the unfortunate incident with the snake charmer. But I cannot recall the exact time.”

  “Perhaps I can talk with this snake charmer? He may remember.”

  Abdul looked shifty. “If he did, it is probably the last thing he remembered.” He looked up to the ceiling and crossed himself clumsily, back to front and upside-down.

  Geoffrey was obviously going to get no further with this line of enquiry, so he opened the door to Maria’s room and stepped inside. Abdul made to follow him in, but Geoffrey closed the door firmly and hung his gauntlets over the panel in the door through which he was sure Abdul peered. There was a hurt silence, and then footsteps receded down the corridor.

  The room was whitewashed and tastefully decorated with blue marble tiles, lending it a clean, cool appearance. Several bottles stood on a low table, near a large bed draped with blue covers. Geoffrey saw no sign of Maria, and sat down on the bed to wait. A few moments later, he was aware that the bed was shaking. He leapt to his feet and hauled the covers away, revealing Maria huddled into a ball and laughing uncontrollably.

  He waited while she brought her mirth under control, and wondered at his own surliness. His dreadful suspicions of Roger seemed to have robbed him of his sense of humour. Maria, still giggling, scrambled off the bed and came to stand next to him at the window.

  “What is the matter with you?” she demanded playfully. “You usually do not mind a joke.”

  “Why are you here?” he countered. “I cannot imagine Mistress Melisende would approve.”

  Maria grimaced. “You will not tell her, will you?”

  “No. But others might. If the job you have with her is more important to you than what you do here, you should consider your position more carefully.”

  “Both are important to me!” pouted Maria.

  “I meant financially,” said Geoffrey. “But it is none of my business.” He took her by the hand and led her over to sit next to him on the bed. “I need to ask you some questions about Mistress Melisende. Will you answer them?”

  “What questions?” asked Maria suspiciously. “And since when do Norman knights ask so politely when they can simply demand?”

  “You sound like your Mistress! I will demand if it makes answering easier for you,” said Geoffrey, with a reluctant smile. “Now. How long have you worked for her?”

  Maria raised her hands. “That is easy! Since she arrived here.”

  “And when was that?”

  “A year ago, when your crowd took the city.”

  “A year?” repeated Geoffrey, puzzled. “She came with the Crusaders? I imagined she was in the city when it fell, and that was when she was widowed. She certainly gives the impression that she was here then.”

  “Oh no,” said Maria. “She came when you did. She posed as an Italian so that she might travel here with the Crusaders, but she is really a Greek.”

  Geoffrey was more puzzled still. “Why would she want to come to a city where Greeks are treated so badly? What happened to her husband?”

  Maria’s eyes lit up, and she leaned nearer to him so that she could whisper conspiratorially. “Do you know, I do not think she is a widow at all! I think her husband is alive somewhere. Perhaps he was violent to her, or a criminal! But I think she came on the Crusade to escape him!”

  It seemed a rather extreme way to escape, but if a woman were desperate and had the means to make herself a new life at the end of it, Geoffrey supposed it would not be impossible. He wondered what kind of husband would drive the aggressive, self-confident Melisende to such ends, and decided it would be a man he had no wish to encounter.

  “She absolutely hates Normans,” Maria went on blithely. “So perhaps he was a Norman. Like you,” she added for his edification, raising her huge brown eyes to look at him. “That must explain why she does not like you.”

  “I think I may have managed that all on my own …”

  “No! I am right!” exclaimed Maria, clapping her hands together gleefully. “It all makes sense now! That is why she told me to tell her whenever I saw you. I had to note
who you were with and what you were doing. And why she asked my sister, Katrina—she works as a kitchen maid in the citadel—to watch you too.”

  “Did she?” said Geoffrey, thinking fast. “I wonder why?” It had to be because Melisende was involved in something sinister! Was she Roger’s accomplice? Or he hers? Ends began to come together in his mind. The men who had followed him back from his meeting with Tancred had been speaking Greek—they must have been sent by Melisende to watch his movements, just like Maria and Katrina had been instructed to do. In which case, he had been right in thinking she had some kind of secret. Perhaps she had murdered this monstrous husband of hers, and that was the reason why she had to engage in such a desperate flight. And having attained a taste for killing, she was busy again, murdering priests and knights. It was beginning to fit together. Or was it? Why would Roger be in her employ?

  He leaned back and considered, while Maria went to the table and began picking at a plate of nuts. Melisende could be the killer, and Roger, he knew, had killed Marius. But why? And Melisende clearly could not have killed Loukas when she was in custody at the citadel. So did Roger kill the monk for her, to prove her innocence? But somehow Geoffrey could not imagine the blustering Roger stealing into the Holy Sepulchre, and lying in wait for a crippled lay brother to slay. Perhaps he had been waiting to kill someone else, though, a real monk, and had panicked and killed poor Loukas by mistake. That would explain why the murder of Loukas seemed to represent a break in the pattern: a member of the Orthodox Church, rather than a Latin.

  “Will you tell Mistress Melisende you met me tonight?” asked Geoffrey, standing and wandering to the window again.

  “Well, I would,” said Maria bluntly, “had I met you anywhere else. But if I told her I had seen you, she would pester me with questions, and she would be bound to find out where we met in the end. And then I would lose my job for certain.”

  “Do you know a scribe called Dunstan?”

  “Dunstan? Oh yes. He often visited Mistress Melisende.”

  Geoffrey raised his eyebrows. “In her house? For what purpose?”

  I would not know,” said Maria, with a ridiculous air of false innocence. “Buying cakes, I should imagine. Dunstan likes cakes.”

  “Did you know he had died?”

  “Who? Dunstan?” she asked, startled. She thought for a moment. “He has not been for cakes for more than a week now. But he came irregularly, so we would have no reason to assume any harm had befallen him.”

  “There was a box of your cakes in his desk that made my dog very sick.”

  “You gave our cakes to your dog? That horrible black-and-white thing? They were probably too rich for it. They are made with the finest ingredients.”

  “I think, in Dunstan’s cakes, poison was one of these fine ingredients.”

  She looked at him for a moment with her mouth agape, and then went into peals of laughter. “Now you are more your old self! Joking and teasing. I was worried about all this seriousness.”

  “I am not jesting with you. Dunstan’s cakes were poisoned.”

  The laughter faded from her face. “You are serious!” She swallowed hard. “I make the cakes, and Melisende makes the bread, but I did not poison any of them. Perhaps Dunstan put the poison there himself. Perhaps he planned to make a gift of them to someone he did not like. And then me and Melisende would be blamed for the murders, not him,” she concluded gloomily.

  “Do you know of anyone Dunstan might want to poison?”

  She shook her head. “He was not a pleasant man. He was always grumbling about someone. I cannot imagine he was popular. But he never mentioned anyone specifically he did not like.”

  Geoffrey walked to the table and fiddled restlessly with one of the cups. Even with Maria’s empty-headed information, he was still no closer to establishing a motive. Was it possible Dunstan was visiting Melisende’s house to blackmail her over the business of her mysteriously absent husband, and that she slipped him a box of poisoned cakes as he left? But what blackmailer was likely to accept such a gift from his victim? Perhaps Dunstan did poison them himself, intending to use them for someone else. But whom? And why? Did he intend to give them to Roger? Did Roger know exactly what they were when he stole them from Dunstan’s desk and saw an opportunity to poison Geoffrey—the man who was investigating his crimes? But Roger knew that Geoffrey hated sweet Greek cakes, and would not have eaten any when offered. Roger had been most definitely planning on eating them himself, so perhaps he really had not known that they would have killed him.

  Geoffrey was becoming tired. His head throbbed from lack of sleep and the weight of his discoveries, and he longed to be in his own chamber, away from the artificial joviality of the brothel. He turned from the window, made his farewells to Maria, and opened the door. At that moment, there was a particularly loud yell from the carousing knights downstairs, so loud that neither Geoffrey nor Maria heard the thud of the arrow that smashed into the wall where Geoffrey had been standing.

  Geoffrey intended to leave Abdul’s Pleasure Palace and let Roger find his own way home. Roger probably had no intention of leaving anyway, not when there was still wine to be downed and women to be accosted. As Geoffrey reached the head of the stairs, he glanced up a corridor that ran at right angles to the one he had just walked down, and paused. Someone was lying there, partly propped up against the wall. Even from that distance, the dull sheen of oil that glistened on the man’s face told Geoffrey that it was Abdul.

  He approached cautiously, aware that if Abdul had imbibed too much of his own wine, he might prefer to sleep off his indignities in private. But Geoffrey strongly suspected Abdul was not foolish enough to drink the sour wine he served the knights, and that there was another reason why he should be prone on the floor. Geoffrey glanced around quickly to make sure it was not some kind of trap to catch him unawares, and quickly knelt next to the rotund brothel-keeper.

  Abdul stirred when Geoffrey shook his shoulder, and then he groaned softly.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Jerusalem is not the city it was,” bemoaned Abdul, clutching at a lump on the side of his head, already turning dark with the beginnings of a bruise. “Between you and me, I preferred the Saracens to the Christians. They were not so greedy and not so aggressive.”

  “Did you see who hit you?”

  Abdul shook his head and tried to struggle to his feet. Geoffrey helped him. “But it is not the first time I have been robbed in my own house. At least I still have this.”

  He raised a hand, and in it Geoffrey saw the chain and locket that the Patriarch had given Roger in payment for his spying services. Abdul inspected it carefully in the light from a torch on the wall.

  “That villain!” he exclaimed. “This is not even silver! Look! It is nothing but base metal!”

  Geoffrey smiled grimly. Perhaps there was justice in the world after all. Roger had been paid for his traitorous services with imitation jewelry, and the scheming Abdul had been duped by his own greed. Abdul grunted and put the necklace in his purse. “I will give this to Maria. She will not know it is of poor quality.”

  “Did Roger hit you?”

  “Oh lord, no. The attack came from the direction of the back stairs. Sir Roger was already ensconced in a room with Eveline. Eveline is …”

  He stopped in midsentence as another tremendous crash came from below, accompanied by shouting. Abdul groaned anew.

  “It is not my night, Sir Geoffrey. First I am hit on the head, and now your comrades riot.”

  “Do they often riot?” asked Geoffrey as Abdul braced himself to enter the fray.

  “They most certainly do,” replied Abdul with resignation. “And from the noise, I see tonight they are in earnest.”

  He hurried away, while Geoffrey crouched down to peer at the scene below from the top of the stairs. A table flew past his line of vision, smashing to pieces against a wall. Men ran here and there in various stages of undress, while women screamed. Abdul’s voice
rose in a reedy shout above the chaos, appealing for calm, but either the knights did not hear or they did not care. From the rooms upstairs, more knights and women emerged, jostling past Geoffrey to join in the chaos.

  Geoffrey had expected Roger to be one of the first to rally to the call, since the big knight was never one to pass up the opportunity for a fight—armed or unarmed or, Geoffrey imagined, clothed or unclothed—but there was no sign of him.

  A Lorrainer was weaving down the corridor toward Geoffrey, and took a swing at him as he passed. Geoffrey ducked it with ease and heaved the Lorrainer head over heels down the steps. He saw the tumbling knight knock over two more who were attempting to climb the stairs, and then he headed toward the room that Abdul had said Roger had hired. He knocked softly and called, but there was no reply. He hesitated, wondering whether to abandon Roger and slip away—fights between knights were notoriously violent, and he had no wish to become involved in a brawl that was none of his making.

  The shouting from below was growing louder and sounded as though it might be spreading to the street. Geoffrey knew he had to make up his mind quickly, or he would end up fighting whether he liked it or not. He turned the handle, pushed open the door, and gasped in horror.

  The room was very much like the one in which he had seen Maria, except that its decor was green not blue. And the covers on the bed were stained a deep crimson.

  Two people lay there, and Geoffrey edged forward, his heart thudding. Eveline lay on her back, her eyes staring vacantly at the ceiling, while a blossom of blood oozed from a wound in her chest. Next to her, also on his back, was Roger, his mouth agape as he snored lustily, an empty wine goblet in his hand. Geoffrey felt sick. For a moment, all sounds receded, and he was aware only of Roger’s snores and the dead woman on the bed. Then a particularly loud bang from downstairs brought him to his senses. He edged away, but as he moved, Roger opened his eyes, groaned loudly, and called Geoffrey’s name.