Terror of Constantinople

by Richard Blake

  At last, we set out. It was still blackest night and while the streets were brightly lit, there were fewer people about than when I’d been carried back from the Imperial Palace. Mostly drunk, the Circus Faction bands took no interest in us. No one asked us for identification.

  We’d dressed the body in a long hooded cloak. Similarly clad, Authari and I walked on either side of it. The leather thongs about its wrists that we clutched tight to our chests made it look as if the dead man had his arms around our necks for support. The hood was of a stiff enough fabric to hide how the head flopped low on the chest, and the length of the cloak to some extent concealed the fact that the feet weren’t stumbling beside us, but trailing along the ground.

  Authari and I swayed gently from side to side as we dragged the body along, giving our best appearance of a trio of drunks – one being helped along by the others.

  Also hooded, Martin walked a few yards ahead, keeping an eye out for Black Agents or anyone else who might be inclined to give us more than a passing glance.

  We dumped the body in the cellar beneath a derelict wine shop where the stench of decayed human shit and other filth was already overpowering. Martin struck steel on flint to get our lamp going and, as in Rome with any dead burglar, we stripped the body. He slid a ring off the signet finger for later dropping through a drain cover.

  As a final precaution, Authari took out the short sword he’d brought along and cut the head off the corpse. Then we heaped rubble over the body, and hoped the rats would find it before anyone else did.

  ‘Murderous fucking Greek!’ he snarled, spitting on to the mashed-up brains.

  ‘I’ll see you in Hell!’ Martin added with uncharacteristic passion.

  ‘Mustn’t the Last Trump sound first?’ I asked with a deliberate lack of relevance. My own head was coming on to ache again.

  After disposing of what remained of the head in a neighbouring cellar we crept back to the Legation by a different and very circuitous route, arriving there just as dawn was preparing to fringe the eastern sky with rosy fingers.

  I couldn’t speak for Authari. He was now in impassive freedman mode, carrying out his duties without question. But I know Martin and I were feeling rather better for having got rid of the body. So I was surprised by the argument that broke out between him and Authari as we approached the Legation.

  ‘I told you,’ Martin whispered, ‘not to leave him alone.’

  ‘Don’t moan at me,’ came the reply. ‘I left the dinner earlier than you. I only nodded off for a moment.’

  I turned and shut them up. This was not the time or the place for discussing anything – not even what Alypius might have been doing in my bedroom earlier.

  ‘We’ll sleep,’ I said firmly as I knocked at the Legation gate and Radogast raised the bar. ‘We’ll sleep until the sun is well up. Then we’ll decide with clear heads what to do next.’

  Inside the main hall I helped to lower the bar on the gate, then I led the way towards my suite.

  Just at that moment Demetrius burst through the door to our right.

  ‘There you are, sir!’ he cried, his eyes wide with terror. Other officials milled around him, silent in their panic. ‘Oh, sir – we’ve been looking for you everywhere. Do come at once and help. I fear His Excellency the Permanent Legate has come to grief.’

  39

  The Permanent Legate had his private rooms arranged almost as a mirror image of my own suite. Where mine were to the left of the main hall, his were to the right. For the first time since my arrival, the door leading in was unlocked and open.

  With an involuntary but brief pause at the doorway, I stepped through into the corridor and made for the staircase, which was in the same relative position as my own. I hadn’t before realised how my suite had come to differ from other parts of the Legation because we’d improved it by a series of incremental touches over the past few months – a rug here, an ornament there, and so on. We’d made it into a home.

  Over on this side, there had been no improvements. The change of season had combined with the dilapidated externals to produce a damp smell on this side of the dome. Paint was flaking off the plastered walls to reveal brown stains beneath.

  At the top of the stairs I encountered the legal official, Antony. He was dancing from side to side with agitation. Behind him, a slave was pushing in vain at what I took to be the door of the Permanent Legate’s bedroom.

  ‘Oh, sir,’ Antony cried, ‘the door is locked and bolted from the inside. We fear the worst.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I shouted above the wailing of the slaves.

  ‘Shut those fucking slaves up,’ I added with a snarl, ‘or I’ll have them flogged.’

  There was silence. Then Demetrius embarked on a babbling explanation in his wretched Greek. Just before dawn, he’d been woken by a scream coming from the Permanent Legate’s room.

  ‘Where do you sleep?’ I broke in. He indicated quarters beyond those of the Permanent Legate, in the right arm of the Legation. I wondered if he’d managed to hear any of the disturbances in my suite much earlier in the night. Perhap he’d been drunk in any event.

  Demetrius explained that he’d got the key to the Permanent Legate’s rooms – they were normally locked, he added – and had gone up to knock on the door.

  ‘All I heard,’ he said in a sepulchral whisper, ‘was a shuffling, and then nothingness.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you have the key. Get the door open, and we can see for ourselves.’

  ‘I tried opening the door,’ he replied. ‘The key pushes and pulls from the outside but the door is bolted on the inside. Look—’ He pushed the key in and out again, and rattled the door handle, to make his point. He fumbled again with the key.

  ‘Let me,’ I said, pushing him out of the way. I wanted my bed and I wanted to see the Permanent Legate. I’d achieve neither unless I took matters into my own hands.

  I banged hard on the door. ‘Your Excellency,’ I shouted, ‘please unbolt the door. We need to speak with you urgently.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Please, Your Excellency,’ I tried again, ‘we fear you are in some trouble. Please open the door, or at least reply. Otherwise, we must force the door.’

  Still nothing.

  The officials were looking agitated again. Martin’s face was a blank of tired confusion.

  I turned to Authari. ‘Go back with Radogast,’ I said, nodding towards our own suite. ‘Find something we can use as a battering ram. We’ll get in there soon enough.’

  It didn’t help that the narrowness of the corridor gave us very little room for battering the door down, or that it was tougher than expected. While Martin kept the officials out of the way, the three of us – big strong Northerners all – smashed again and again at what was as unyielding as a brick wall. By the time we’d loosened the door in its frame, the oak bench from our own kitchen would never see service again except as fuel for the ovens.

  With a massive splintering of wood, the door was at last off its hinges. We’d damaged most of the frame and part of the wall in our assault. Once the dust had settled, and it was clear that no one in the room was moving, I was first through the doorway. With the window shuttered, the room was as dark as night.

  ‘Give me one of those lamps,’ I called to the Legation slaves as I gently prevented Authari from going past me into the room.

  ‘Whatever we find,’ I explained, ‘mustn’t be disturbed.’

  The lamp only allowed my eyes to confirm what my nose had told me. There was a pool of blood on the floor. It was perhaps six foot across. It began just short of where I’d stopped on first entering the room. Another few inches, and I’d have been sliding on the stuff.

  I cautiously made my way round the edge of the room and drew the bolts that held the shutters in place. The cold silver of dawn streamed in.

  A body in a dark robe lay face down in the middle of the blood pool. A few feet away from it, a chair was overturned. So far as I could t
ell from its fast-congealing edges, the pool of blood was undisturbed.

  ‘No!’ I said sharply as others stepped in behind me. ‘No one comes into this room. No one touches anything. I want you all out now!’

  I took hold of Demetrius and slapped him hard across the face. He choked back his growing howl of terror. I glared the others into silence.

  ‘Martin,’ I said, ‘please get a message sent off to Theophanes. Then do come straight back. I need your assistance.’

  ‘His Excellency has committed the ultimate sin against God,’ Demetrius struck up again in a melodramatic whisper.

  Antony joined in: ‘We are all polluted by the enormity of his sin.’

  ‘Shut up!’ I snarled at the pair of them. ‘Shut up if you don’t want to be shitting teeth tomorrow. Whatever you think, whatever you think you’ve seen, doesn’t constitute a fact until it’s been verified. You will all go and sit together at the end of the corridor. You will say nothing to each other. You will wait until I speak with each of you.’

  It seemed an age before Martin came hurrying back up the stairs. He’d brought a book of waxed tablets and some of our silver pens. If I hadn’t known him better, I’d have complimented him on his forethought. As it was, I marvelled that he hadn’t gone to pieces on the spot and joined in the lamentations around me. Instead he gave me a calm glance that called for instructions and looked into the room. He added that he’d checked the nursery. Except Gutrune was returning to her previous grumpy self, all was unchanged there.

  Like me, Martin was coming to terms with this new horror by following a procedure that, since our first investigation together in Rome, had become a familiar routine.

  Unless Demetrius was lying or mistaken about times, the man I’d killed couldn’t also have murdered the Permanent Legate. The chance that two unconnected killers had broken into the Legation on the same night was equally unlikely.

  That attempt on my life might not be the last. This being so, it made sense to get as much information as I could from the crime scene before the usual duffers arrived to remove any possible clues. It would also help to take my mind off the growing chaos of my own life by focusing on the last moments of another person’s.

  ‘It is dawn on Sunday the 27th of September,’ I dictated, walking carefully back into the room. Martin followed, making silent strokes of his shorthand on the soft wax surface of his boards, while Authari kept the doorway barred to anyone who might be inclined to ignore my instructions.

  ‘We arrived to find the door locked and apparently bolted from the inside. Having broken the door down, we found the window bolted from the inside.

  ‘There is a body lying on the floor. It seems to be of a man in late middle age. Without turning the body over and looking for a wound, it seems fair to say that death was violent and from a slash to the throat.’

  I looked around. The only real difference between this room and my own was the lack of any balcony with stairs down to the garden.

  ‘There are no other obvious means of entry to the room,’ I said, again looking around me. I went to the window and looked down. It was a sheer drop of some thirty feet as I knew from experience. I’d have the ledge above the window checked later. If there was a ladder long enough to get someone up here, it would surely have left some traces.

  I turned back to the room and stood over the body. I could see that Martin was sketching its position unbidden.

  ‘The body,’ I added to my description, ‘is wholly unstained by blood behind. It is dressed in outgoing clothes. There is no evidence that it was approached once the blood had spread around it. There is no evidence that the bed has been slept in.’

  I learned over the body. The left arm was outstretched, the hand empty. The right arm was underneath.

  I took hold of the right shoulder and lifted the body over. It flopped stiffly on to its back. Eyes open, face contorted with some final terror, it stared lifelessly up at me. A dark gash across the throat, stretching from one ear to the other, confirmed the most likely cause of death.

  The right hand was empty too, with traces of congealed blood on the wrist where it had touched the floor. The index finger and thumb had the sooty blackness of a hand more accustomed to pen and ink than to water. It was only then that I noticed the body had a rather clerical smell about it of unchanged undergarments.

  The lack of hygiene aside, was that how I might have been found, had I gone to bed as usual? You may think the question would depress me. In fact, it rather cheered me. I hadn’t gone to bed as usual. Because of that, I wasn’t lying in a pool of my own blood.

  My luck – so far as you can call it that – was holding.

  ‘Martin,’ I asked after another round of dictation, ‘can you see any razor in the room, or other weapon that might have produced this wound?’

  He swallowed hard, fighting back an obvious urge to vomit. But he edged round the blood pool and looked under the bed. I looked in and behind the cupboards. We went carefully through the bedclothes together.

  No weapon.

  ‘Well,’ I said, dropping my voice to a soft mutter, ‘whatever can be said about the locked door and window, this isn’t looking much like suicide.’

  I leaned over the body again and gently pulled the head backward. That slash across the throat had severed not only blood vessels but also the windpipe.

  ‘My understanding of suicide’, I said, ‘is that the culprit starts with light strokes across the throat, getting up courage for something more radical. Whoever did this almost took the head off with a single stroke.’

  ‘I’m not sure a man would have the strength to do this to himself,’ Martin added.

  ‘I agree,’ I said. ‘And where’s the weapon? If this isn’t murder, I don’t know what is.’

  We looked again at the locked window and smashed-in door, and back at each other.

  ‘But how?’ Martin asked.

  ‘It was the Dark One himself,’ someone called out from behind Authari. It was Antony. He’d crept forward to poke his head through the doorway. The Dark One has been among us. Let God bear witness—’

  He would have said more but Authari had seized him from behind, his sword against Antony’s throat. The sudden pressure on the scabbing of his back choked off his words to a gasp of pain.

  ‘Get back to where I sent you, scum,’ I reminded him, pushing my face close to his. ‘Or you’ll be joining your boss on the floor.’

  I stopped. Since I’d taken on the preliminary investigation, I might as well do it properly.

  ‘No,’ I said to Authari, ‘release him. You’ – I pointed to the man – ‘come over here.’

  Antony shuffled reluctantly forward, keeping his eyes off the body.

  ‘Is this the Permanent Legate?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Only Demetrius ever dealt with His Excellency.’

  I had Demetrius brought in and repeated the question.

  ‘Who else could it be?’ he muttered, looking away from the body.

  ‘I didn’t ask who it must be,’ I said, resisting an urge to grab at the man. ‘I will ask yet again – is this the body of the Permanent Legate?’

  Demetrius looked down at the body. Yes, he said quietly, this was the Permanent Legate.

  I asked if anyone else could identify the body and he confirmed that there was no one. He was the only official who’d not been sent out of the city before I arrived. Since then, he’d been the only one to deal with the Permanent Legate. He’d been with him every day – most recently the evening before, when they’d been going over the accounts of a charitable foundation in Ephesus.

  I stopped him at the mention of Ephesus. Hadn’t Theophanes discussed the place with the Permanent Legate? I’d investigate this later.

  Alone again, Martin and I searched the room more thoroughly. We kicked at the boards to see if any were loose. We stripped the bed. We tapped carefully along the walls. We pulled the bookcase and the wardrobe away from the wall to make sure th
ere wasn’t any hidden doorway or other point of access.

  As I finished dictating my notes, Theophanes arrived.

  ‘This is a terrible thing,’ he announced in a sonorous voice. ‘A suicide – and of one so high in Holy Mother Church!’

  He looked at me, plainly taking in my outdoor clothes. His eyes flickered to Martin and Authari.

  ‘Not suicide,’ I said, choosing to ignore how quickly he had got here. I gave him the facts we’d gathered. His eyes darted rapidly about the room, taking in the scene.

  ‘Alypius,’ he rapped in his official tone, ‘I want the Legation sealed at once. No one enters. No one leaves. And I want this room and the whole corridor sealed off.’

  ‘Theophanes,’ I suggested, taking him aside, ‘you should station someone here in the room – someone you can trust not to mess everything up behind your back. There might be someone hidden in the room. You need to make sure he doesn’t slip away before the room can be taken apart.’

  Theophanes nodded. He suggested Authari should stay and keep watch. It would take a while for any of his trusted investigators to get over from the Ministry. For the moment, the Legation officials had to be watched as well as the body.

  He gave my outdoor cloak another hard stare and seemed about to remark on it. Instead he arranged his features into their official blandness.

  ‘I’m afraid the pair of you will need to give the story in person to the Emperor,’ he said. ‘This is a matter of state importance.’

  40

  After a long wait outside his office, we were ushered into the Imperial Presence. Phocas sat at his desk, giving responses to a mass of letters and petitions. Secretaries surrounded him, taking down his brief words for the usual writing up into more cere monious utterances.

  Theophanes had made sure to tell us that there was no need for the usual prostrations in a matter of utilitarian business. We nodded respectfully at Phocas as he looked towards us. He pointed at two chairs against a wall as he continued work with his secretaries.

  Theophanes went and stood beside him.