Conspiracy

court, not the austere rented rooms of a dead priest. Turning towards the desk, I noticed a heap of cloth on the wooden chair. I lifted it to see that it was a linen undershirt and silk hose, folded neatly. I bent and sniffed the shirt; it smelled faintly of sweat, but no trace of perfume. Perhaps Joseph had come here to change clothes; one of his friends or relatives could have arranged to meet him with an outfit less conspicuous than the habit of a religious, and he might have applied the perfume as part of his altered image. This idea brought a jolt of panic; suppose he had changed his appearance in order to leave Paris until someone else was hanged for Paul’s murder and he was no longer under suspicion? Once he was out of the city, the chances of finding him or holding him responsible were as good as non-existent. But if he had swapped clothes, where was his friar’s habit?

The candle flame snapped and shivered in a sudden gust as the curtain across the partition flapped again and I realised that the small casement in the alcove must be open. Had Joseph escaped that way, to avoid being seen in his new disguise? I pulled back the drape and stifled a cry at what I saw in the instant that the wind snuffed out the candle.

A man lay prone on the bed, naked, his face turned away from me, his skin white and disturbingly luminous in the gloom. Though I had sprung back by instinct, in the same moment I knew already that he would not be woken. I reached out a tentative finger to make sure; the flesh was cold and unyielding. I leaned across and pulled the window shut; it took a few moments before I could reignite the tinder-box and steady my breath. The crown of his head was tonsured; I had little doubt that this was Joseph de Chartres, who only the previous night had landed such a forceful punch to my jaw and outrun me through the fog. Now he was lying dead and naked in the bed of the man I supposed him to have murdered.

Attached to the wall above the bed was a fixture for a candle; I fitted the light into the bracket so that I had both hands free to turn the body on to its back, half-dreading what I would find. But there was no blood; his skin had the flawless white sheen of a waxwork, an impression aided by his fair complexion and sparse body hair. I laid him out with as much gentleness as I could manage, given the weight of his body; whatever a man may have done in life, it is a basic human courtesy to treat his corpse with dignity. I lifted his right arm and felt along its length. The time I had spent as a young friar assisting the brother infirmarian at San Domenico had given me a basic knowledge of human anatomy in various states; it had always interested me to note, as we prepared the body of a deceased brother for burial, the different stages of stiffening in the limbs, how quickly the discolouration would appear on the skin. The ability to judge such matters had proved unexpectedly useful more than once over the past few years when confronted with unnatural death. With Joseph the rigidity was only just beginning to set in; I estimated that he had been dead not much more than four or five hours. That fitted with the laundress’s story that she had seen him arrive here around noon.

I looked more closely at the face. He would have been an attractive man in life; now his lips had taken on a bluish tinge and he stared at the canopy of the bed from glassy eyes. I lifted the candle down for better light. Though it was cheap tallow and the flame coughed out an oily smoke, I could see in the dim light that the whites of his eyes were flecked with scarlet pinpricks. I clenched my jaw, fought down my distaste and prised open his mouth to find the tongue swollen, the inside of his mouth darkened with discoloured patches, all signs suggesting that he had been strangled. A faint brown mark ran across his throat, almost too indistinct to suggest a ligature. Soft material, then, whatever the killer had used; not a rope. Leaning in, I noticed livid scratches down the side of his neck where the skin had been gouged. I checked his right hand again. Three of the fingers were slightly misshapen – perhaps this was the source of his claim to have a crippled hand. It had not hampered him from hitting me; I could see bruises across the top of the knuckles where he had made contact. More significantly, I found traces of dried blood under the fingernails. He must have been scrabbling against the ligature as it tightened; the killer had taken him by surprise. How, though? Had he been waiting here to ambush Joseph, knowing he would come back eventually, or was it someone he had arranged to meet – someone he knew and trusted, but who needed to dispose of him now that his part in Paul’s death was suspected? But that still did not explain why Joseph was naked. I shone the candle along the length of his body and stopped when I reached the shrunken penis in its furze of pale hair. The light picked out a faint pearly sheen across the crease of his groin. Reluctantly, I looked more closely, touching a fingertip to the skin, where a dried film cracked and peeled. So he had ejaculated recently; this could happen to a hanged man at the point of death, I knew, but I was not certain if the same occurred with strangulation. Or was there another, more obvious explanation – that he had met the lover Benoît mentioned and