01 - Murder in the Holy City

by Simon Beaufort

  Geoffrey supposed what she said was true, although he wondered what other false impressions she still harboured about her ambitious, scheming uncle. He said nothing and watched bald Brother Alain the scribe trailing disconsolately across the courtyard to begin his day of scrivening.

  Melisende continued talking. “I still have nightmares about the body of that young knight. When I pulled the dagger from him, his hand moved, and I thought he was still alive. I bent to look at his face, and I saw his expression! He looked so shocked! And so young!”

  Geoffrey refrained from pointing out that being stabbed in the back came as a shock to most people, and settled for saying, “He was twenty-two. And a friend of mine.”

  “Oh. I am sorry.” She looked genuinely sympathetic, but Geoffrey was not about to lose sight of the fact that Melisende came from the same stock as Daimbert and might well have inherited, or learned from him, his superb acting abilities and innate cunning.

  “Do you have any notion as to who killed Loukas, the Greek who was murdered at the Holy Sepulchre while you were under arrest?”

  She shrugged. “No more than I know who is killing the others. It was fortunate for me that the man died when he did. Uncle would have been obliged to hand me back to the Advocate when he returned, and time was running short.”

  Hugh had suggested that one of Melisende’s people had killed Loukas to “prove” she was not guilty of the other murders. It would, of course, have been in Daimbert’s interests for her to be released, so that she could go on spying for him. But did Melisende know that a death had been arranged so that she might go free? On balance, he decided it had probably not crossed her mind: her improbable illusions of Uncle’s essential benevolence went too deep. He thought also that she had seemed genuinely shocked when the Patriarch had suggested Geoffrey should die for what he knew, and reluctantly conceded that she had had no direct hand in Loukas’s death.

  She continued. “The rumour in the Greek Quarter is that the Advocate is killing Bohemond’s knights to prevent an uprising against him. I was confused, though, why you should be investigating for the Advocate if that were true. Meanwhile, I was worried about Uncle. He has allied himself with Bohemond, and the attacks against Bohemond’s knights are, indirectly, attacks against him. If I had known you were working for him, I would have warned you not to waste time looking in the Greek Quarter, but to concentrate elsewhere. As it was, I thought you were working for the Advocate, so I was only too pleased to see that you were wasting your time with the Greeks.”

  “What about Dunstan? Did you know him, or not?”

  She shrugged. “What I told you in the market was true. He bought cakes from me.”

  “Maria told me he came to your house many times.”

  “What? But that’s ridiculous! Why should he do that?”

  “Because he knew your real identity, and was threatening to tell?”

  She frowned. “You have asked me before if this Dunstan was blackmailing me, so, I think I can assume from this that Dunstan was a blackmailer. But you must believe me, Sir Geoffrey, when I say that I would never allow some fat, slimy toad like Dunstan to come between me and my work in the Greek Quarter! He would not have left my house until Uncle had been told exactly what he was about!”

  Looking at her flashing eyes and determined chin, and bearing in mind his own experiences of her temper and abilities, Geoffrey had no doubt she was telling the truth. So the partial note Geoffrey had found in Dunstan’s desk demanding money for secrets kept had not been intended for Melisende, but someone else.

  “Did you know Dunstan worked for your uncle?”

  “Did he?” She seemed startled, and Geoffrey wondered whether the Patriarch deliberately kept his niece in the dark lest she be uncovered by the Greeks: what she did not know, she could not tell potential enemies.

  “So was Maria lying about Dunstan’s numerous visits to your home?”

  “Well, yes. She is very … impressionable. She probably imagined it.”

  “But you used her to spy on me.”

  “What? Maria? Are you serious? I could not possibly use her! She is far too unreliable. She would manage to concentrate for a few moments, and then she would be off with some man. She is an excellent cakemaker, but short on wits.”

  “What about her sister, Katrina?”

  Melisende raised her hands. “You seem to know more about her from her job at this horrible brothel than I do as her employer. I did not know she had a sister. She told me she was Akira’s only child.”

  “Did you discuss Dunstan’s poisoned cakes with her last night?”

  She looked surprised. “Yes, I did.” Her eyes narrowed. “You were eavesdropping on us!” When he did not respond, she gave him a withering look and continued. “She told me you had been asking questions about me, and I told her some of our cakes had been poisoned and sent to Dunstan. We sat together trying to work out who might have done such a thing.”

  “I think we may have gravely underestimated Maria,” said Geoffrey after a moment. “I think there is more to her than she lets on.”

  “Maria? Not a chance!” said Melisende dismissively. Then she looked at Geoffrey appraisingly. “But tell me why you think so.”

  “Akira for a start,” said Geoffrey. Melisende looked blank. “One of the five murdered men appears in the house of Maria’s much detested father, and another in the house of her employer, who makes no secret of the fact that she considers Maria a witless wanton.”

  “Are you suggesting that Maria killed those men and put them in our houses for malice?” asked Melisende in disbelief.

  “Yes. I am not sure if she killed them herself, but it is certainly possible it was she who arranged for them to be slaughtered in those particular locations.”

  “But that is …” She faltered into silence. Geoffrey waited. “I had a note that afternoon. From Uncle, wanting to see me. But when I arrived here, Uncle said he had sent the note several days before, and that he had been wondering why I had not come sooner.” She looked up at him, her honey-brown eyes blazing. “Maria must have found the note and kept it, so that she could send it later and get me out of the house when it was convenient for her! She betrayed me!”

  “She probably feels the same way about you,” said Geoffrey reasonably.

  “What are you saying?” she demanded.

  “Come on, Melisende! You are an Italian noblewoman who has infiltrated the Greek community in order to pass their secrets to the Patriarch! How is that different from what she has done to you?”

  Melisende was silent.

  “I suppose she uses Abdul’s Pleasure Palace as a means of gaining information from the knights,” he said, reflecting. “Even Roger told me he liked Maria because she could speak his language. So the chances are that the knights talk to Maria, and who knows what secrets they might tell her?”

  “She came with recommendations from Father Almaric at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,” said Melisende. “And he is a saintly man whose loyalty to Uncle is absolute.”

  “Well, she fooled him too,” said Geoffrey, recalling the benign, rather bewildered old Benedictine he had spoken with about the death of Loukas. “But what about these cakes? The poisoned ones that were sent to Dunstan? Do you have any idea who might have tampered with them?”

  She shook her head. “It was not me. It must have been Maria. When she got back from the fight at this … Abdul’s”—she gave a shudder, and Geoffrey suppressed a smile—“she told me that you said you have evidence that it was me who poisoned these wretched cakes.”

  “She told you that? I can assure you, I have no such evidence.”

  Melisende looked sombre. “So it is Maria who is behind all this! Silly, empty-headed, flirtatious Maria.”

  Geoffrey said nothing, but gave a huge sigh, dispirited by all the intrigue and lies. It had been a long night, and it was beginning to take its toll. He ached all over, felt tired and battered, and wanted nothing more than to return to his chamber in th
e citadel and go to sleep. He made his excuses to Melisende and agreed to meet her the following day.

  As he left, she took his hand and smiled at him beguilingly. He wondered what Tancred would say if he knew his most trusted knight was already looking forward to his next encounter with the Patriarch’s devious niece. He took his leave, striding gladly through the warm, dusty air, and breathing so deeply of it trying to eradicate the last vestiges of the underground atmosphere from his lungs, that he made himself dizzy.

  He approached the citadel with relief and made his way to his own chamber. Hugh was waiting for him and leapt from the window seat with a grin of relief. The dog opened a disinterested eye, and went back to sleep. Geoffrey imagined that someone must have risked life and limb to feed it, or it would not be greeting him with such bored lethargy.

  “Thank God!” said Hugh, rising to thump him on the shoulder in a comradely way. “We have been worried sick about you. Where have you been?”

  Geoffrey told him, briefly, as he began to remove his armour. Hugh gave a whistle.

  “Hell’s fires! Daimbert plays a dangerous game.”

  Geoffrey tugged off a boot, releasing a thin stream of water onto the floor, and then removed the other. “So do we all.”

  Hugh looked at him strangely. “What do you mean?”

  Geoffrey was inutterably weary and longed only to rest. But he could not, in all countenance, sleep while Hugh remained in danger from Roger. He did not want to embark on a long explanation there and then outlining his reasons for Roger’s guilt, and he settled for an explanation that would satisfy Hugh, but that would put him on his guard too.

  “I think I know the identity of the killer,” he said. “And it is not one of the Advocate’s men. Be careful, Hugh. I will not be long in exposing the murderer.”

  Hugh looked as if he would ask questions, but Geoffrey pushed him firmly from his room and closed the door. He rummaged around for a dry hose and lay on the bed. After a moment, he rose and dragged the heavy chest across the floor to block the door. Then he unsheathed his dagger and lay it on the bed near his hand, and was asleep the moment his head touched the covers.

  Later, the handle of the door began to turn slowly; the door eased open with the same deadly care. And then it stopped. The killer pushed a little more, but the door would not budge. He pushed harder still, and the chest gave a protesting crack. Through the partially opened door, the killer saw Geoffrey stir in his sleep, and noted the dagger near his hand. He grimaced. Time was running out: he had already failed to kill Geoffrey with the arrow fired at him at Abdul’s Pleasure Palace the previous night; Geoffrey had survived the attack by Greeks in the old Saracen Quarter; and now he would live because the killer could not enter his room without the heavy chest giving him away. But there would be other opportunities.

  Meanwhile, the dog watched curiously, then went back to its dozing.

  The angle of the sun slanting in through the window told Geoffrey it was late afternoon and that he had slept most of the day. He heaved himself stiffly off the bed and went to the garderobe, where he splashed water from a jug over his head and body, and shaved quickly. The dog came to slather expectantly, nudging Geoffrey toward the box in which unpleasant tendrils of dried meat were stored for occasions such as this. As he had done hundreds of times before, Geoffrey yet again earned the dog’s eternal devotion—an eternity that would last until it finished whatever morsel it sat chewing noisily. Geoffrey excavated a fresh shirt from an untidy pile on a shelf, poured himself a goblet of wine, ignored the dog’s whines for more food, and sat down to think.

  He went over the facts he knew for certain. The knight, Guido, and the monks, Jocelyn and Pius, had been killed within four days of each other. Guido had been bereaved and had taken to walking alone near the Dome of the Rock; he was also having doubts about the morality of his knightly duties and was considering a monastic vocation. Meanwhile John of Sourdeval was a serious young man, who perhaps spent too much time philosophising. So each in his own way was vulnerable. Guido, it seemed, had discovered something that prompted him to contact the Advocate’s scribe Jocelyn. Jocelyn had probably written whatever it was down for him because Guido was illiterate and the monk had then been in a state of nervous agitation from the time Guido’s body was discovered until his own death two days later. After his death, Guido had been sent a letter from the Advocate that had been addressed to Brother Salvatori, which meant that, in all probability, what he had dictated to Jocelyn had been a letter to the Advocate, and the Advocate had acknowledged his letter by responding to the name Guido planned to choose when he took his monkish vows.

  Pius, the third victim, had been murdered in the house of Maria Akira’s father, but had no known connections with the Patriarch or anyone else in power. Could his death have been a mistake then? Or a random killing to take attention from the fact that there had been a very good reason for the deaths of Guido and Jocelyn? The more Geoffrey thought about it, the more that seemed to be plausible. He had been told from the beginning how random the murders seemed to be: the three priests were not the same nationality, not from the same Order, and seemed to have no connection with each other.

  Except the daggers. Geoffrey had seen the carved dagger that had killed John, and he had been told that similar weapons had been used to kill the other victims. Some witnesses had considered the weapon beautiful, others gaudy, depending on their taste. But all five weapons had disappeared, either at the scene, or later, so that Geoffrey could not compare them with the one that had been used to pin the pig’s heart to his wall.

  And the last victim, poor Loukas, had been conveniently dispatched while Melisende languished in the dungeons of her uncle. It was perfectly clear that Loukas’s death had been arranged, as Hugh had said from the beginning, to prove Melisende’s innocence. Loukas was killed in the Holy Sepulchre, and was a poor madman whom nobody would mourn—the most readily dispensable of the monks at the Church and the one selected as a sacrifice for Melisende. The body was found by Celeste. And Geoffrey now knew that Celeste worked for the Patriarch and was deeply involved in his black-market business. Celeste would probably also know—from the Patriarch himself—about the kind of dagger used by the murderer. But Geoffrey only had Celeste’s word that such a dagger had been found on Loukas: the body had been covered with a blanket before the other monks had come, and Celeste claimed the dagger had later disappeared.

  So, there was the killer of Loukas, thought Geoffrey. Nasty Brother Celeste, working possibly under the Patriarch’s instructions so that Melisende could be freed to continue her work in the Greek Quarter. It also explained why Loukas was so different from the others—he had merely been available when Celeste had needed a victim in a hurry. So did Celeste kill the others too? Geoffrey thought back to the bodies in the Holy Sepulchre. He had made a rough measurement of the wounds in John and Loukas, but they had not been the same. The wound in Loukas had been bigger, which Geoffrey had attributed to tearing. But it was equally possible, even likely, that it had not been caused by the same kind of weapon.

  He considered his list of suspects. At the top was Celeste, whom Geoffrey was now certain had killed Loukas. Yet, it seemed Celeste did not actually have a dagger that would tie Loukas’s death to the others, and he had simply pretended that Loukas had been killed with one. So, it was possible that Celeste was not the murderer of the others. Geoffrey compared the lame monk to the victims: illiterate Pius, who did the shopping for his brethren, including braving Akira’s slaughterhouse; and the two knights, trained in combat from youth. The Crusade had not been an easy journey, and those knights who had survived it owed their lives to their superior fighting skills and finely tuned instincts. Stabbing men in the back required no great strength, as Geoffrey himself had pointed out to Hugh when they discussed Melisende’s possible guilt, but it might well require speed. Having followed Celeste down the tunnels under the city, Geoffrey knew he was not a speedy mover.

  The next suspect was Melisende,
the aggressive, single-minded niece of the Patriarch. If Celeste had killed Loukas, then had Melisende killed the others? Perhaps Celeste genuinely believed Melisende’s guilt when he had murdered Loukas to free her. Geoffrey rubbed his sore eyes. But was that really necessary? Why could the Patriarch not simply release her? But the answer to that was clear in the light of Melisende’s revelations in the palace that morning: the Greek community would have been rightly suspicious of an unexplained release, and she would not have been able to carry on passing their secrets to Uncle to the same extent. Loukas’s murder was a sufficiently spectacular and public statement of her innocence to allow her release without question.

  Geoffrey thought hard. The third potential culprit was the Patriarch himself. But then Daimbert would hardly have released Geoffrey to continue his investigation when he had been presented with an ideal opportunity to rid himself of him—especially since Geoffrey now knew about his black-market dealings. Reluctantly, Geoffrey crossed the Patriarch off his mental list of murder suspects, although he remained unconvinced that his involvement was entirely innocent.

  And then there was Roger. Geoffrey knew the big knight well enough to know that he would not have had the patience or deviousness to plan all these deaths. If he had committed the murders, then it would have been under the orders of another. But whom? Celeste? Melisende? Geoffrey already had ample evidence that Roger could have killed Marius, and perhaps Eveline. Yet, the big Englishman had saved Geoffrey’s life by helping him escape from the stable. Roger would know that the chances of Geoffrey uncovering the identity of the killer increased with every day he was alive to investigate, So, if Roger were guilty, why had he saved Geoffrey? Why not let him die?

  Unless he were innocent, of course. Geoffrey rubbed his eyes again and moved on to Courrances, who had urged him to investigate for the Advocate and then locked him in the burning barn. Courrances was devious, and he would certainly be capable of laying false trails and leaving misleading information to make Geoffrey stumble around. He would also love to see Geoffrey fall from grace. The warrior-monk would kill monks or knights without compunction and would probably have had the opportunity to murder Guido, John, Jocelyn and Pius.