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 there 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.’