01 - Murder in the Holy City (21 page)

“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?”

“Well, we know Dunstan is a blackmailer,” said Hugh. “So that is easy. Although you will need to find out what secret of hers he had managed to discover. And the Greek population here despise us. They were grateful at first, when Jerusalem was conquered by Christians and the Saracens were expelled, but their lives changed very little in reality. They simply exchanged one brand of slavery for another. So, the Greek community is being avenged for its bad treatment by this forceful widow.”

“Maria said Warner and d’Aumale were at Abdul’s the night Dunstan killed himself,” said Roger casually, picking at his teeth with his dagger.

“What?” said Hugh. “Are you saying they have an alibi for that ruthless attack on me and poor Marius?”

Roger scratched his head. “Well, she said she saw them there, but she did not see what time they left.”

“Damn!” said Geoffrey. “That does not help us at all. Did anyone else see them?”

“There was some kind of celebration that night, and it became rather rowdy by all accounts,” said Roger wistfully. “Virtually everyone was drunk, and it is almost a week ago now, so I imagine the chances of getting an accurate estimate of when those two bravos left will be fairly remote.”

“Damn!” said Geoffrey again. “That means they could have left at any time, neither proving nor disproving their innocence of Marius’s murder. Which means that we still must consider them suspects. And if this occasion was as debauched as you say, then one, or even both, may have slipped out of Abdul’s and returned there later, after Marius’s murder.”

He stood up and began to pace back and forth restlessly, rubbing his chin. “I can make no sense out of all this,” he said eventually. “We have a host of theories, but no facts. And if Melisende is the murderer, then who killed Marius and knocked you senseless? She certainly did not do that: there is simply no way she could get into the citadel without being seen, even if the guards did let her past the gates on the sly. It just does not make sense.”

“It is a muddle,” agreed Hugh. “I am glad it is for you to solve and not me. I am concerned about what Courrances said to you in the church last week, though. He has tricked you cleverly. All I can say is that I will try to help you reason it out, and may even be persuaded to go out and about with you, since it appears your life might depend on it. What is your next step?”

“Abdul’s Palace. Tonight,” said Geoffrey promptly. Roger looked pleased. “I want to see if we can raise some serious doubts about the alibi of d’Aumale and Warner. And I want to talk to Maria, if she is there, to see whether she can tell us anything about Melisende. Good servants, which Melisende maintains Maria is, are unobtrusive, and their presence is often unnoticed by those they serve. Who knows what Maria may have seen or heard? Such as why Dunstan may have been blackmailing her mistress.”

For the rest of the morning, Geoffrey cleaned his weapons and mended minor damage to his chain mail. He could have ordered Helbye, Fletcher, or Wolfram to do it, but, like every knight, he had once learned to do it himself, and now he trusted his own care of the equipment that might save his life over that of others.

Roger and Hugh sat with him in his room, chatting idly about what they planned to do with the treasures they had amassed during three years’ Crusading. Roger honed his sword as they spoke, testing the sharpness of the edge with his rough, dirty thumb. Hugh lay on the bed with his arms under his head, staring up at the ceiling. The bell summoned them for a meal of the inevitable goat in a strongly spiced sauce, with flat bread and piles of underripe figs that Geoffrey suspected were the major cause of intestinal disorders among the knights of the citadel.

After the meal, as the afternoon heat began to make the horizon shimmer and the city boil, a temporary peace settled, and only the flies showed any signs of activity. Geoffrey, having missed most of his sleep the night before, handed his filthy clothes to Wolfram to put through the process of dirt redistribution he called washing, and retired once more to his room.

Moments later, Helbye arrived with a message from Tancred. Geoffrey scanned through it, but it said nothing of relevance to the case in hand. It told him in exuberant terms about the plans he had for attacking Haifa, and of a sad sight he had encountered on the way. The highly respected Sir Guibert of Apulia and a small band of his soldiers had been attacked by Saracens east of Caesarea, and had been killed to a man. Tancred’s soldiers had buried them in the desert. Such an event was nothing unusual, because journeys outside Jerusalem were always dangerous although Tancred questioned why Guibert should have been so far from home.

Geoffrey lay on the bed, but after a moment he rose again to retrieve the fragments of parchment he had taken from Dunstan’s desk. Sleepily, he tugged at the stone, wondering how he had jammed it back into place so hard that it was difficult to remove again. He slipped his hand into the hole, then snapped out of his pleasant drowsiness with a shock. The hole was empty; the parchments were gone.