who had found Adele’s body that the servant employed by the prostitute had recently left and not been replaced. This would most likely have been the room a maidservant would use.
They went downstairs and into a small room that led off the entryway. It appeared to be a chamber that the harlot had used for a preliminary entertaining of her male guests before retiring to the bedchamber upstairs. Besides a table and two comfortable chairs, there was a brazier in one corner containing a few remnants of cold charcoal. On the table was an unstoppered jug of wine and a pewter cup filled to the brim. It was a handsomely appointed chamber, with wood panelling extending halfway up the walls and small tapestries hung above with depictions that were lascivious in nature. One featured a unicorn with an engorged phallus preparing to mount a snow white mare and the others were of scantily clad maidens posing in forest glades or reclining by secluded pools. Again there was no sign of a disturbance. If the murderer had been a patron of Adele’s, it was likely she had offered him a cup of wine in here-which he had not drunk-and then taken him upstairs, and to her death.
The captain was glad that Bascot was with him. This investigation was not a task that Roget relished. More accustomed to using his fists or sword in direct confrontations with thieves and other petty miscreants, he was well aware that he had little skill in detecting the nuances that betrayed the identity of a murderer. The Templar, on the other hand, had a facility for searching out seemingly irrelevant inconsistencies and proving they were important. Roget did not know if Bascot’s talent was due to the education he had received in a monastery during his youth or whether his years of imprisonment had made him more sensitive to his surroundings but, whatever the reason, the captain was more than willing to let the Templar take the lead in their search.
“Are there any buildings at the back of the premises?” Bascot asked, breaking in on Roget’s reverie.
“Only a shed,” the captain replied, leading the Templar out of the chamber and along a narrow passageway to a small enclosed yard.
There was little else and the two men were preparing to depart when the gate in the shoulder-high fence that surrounded the yard opened and a woman came through. She was about twenty-five years of age, demurely garbed in a plain grey gown and wore a white linen headdress. The rim of hair showing at the edge of her coif was dark brown. She was not uncomely, but neither was she handsome. Her most attractive feature was her eyes, which were a warm hazel colour and had a lively sparkle. Her glance flicked to the Templar badge Bascot wore on the shoulder of his tunic and then to Roget, dwelling on the copper rings that were threaded through his beard before she spoke to him.
“Are you the captain of the sheriff’s town guard?” she asked in a voice that was soft and mellow.
“I am,” Roget confirmed.
“I saw you both enter Adele’s house from next door, which is where I live,” she said. “My name is Constance Turner and I wanted to speak to you.”
Looking behind her, she motioned to someone on the other side of the gate. A young serving maid crept through. She was a very small and skinny young girl, and looked to be no more than fifteen years old. Her bony little face was fearful and she was wringing her hands in distress.
“This is my maid, Agnes,” Constance said. “I think she may have seen the man that murdered my neighbour.”
“ I am a perfume and unguent maker,” mistress Turner said, “and, because goat’s milk is kind to women’s skin, I often use it in my preparations. I like to get it as fresh as possible and buy it from a neighbour just a few houses away who milks his goats early in the morning. Yesterday, I sent Agnes with a jug to get some and, as she was returning, she saw a man knocking at Adele’s door.”
Mistress Turner then added, without any seeming embarrassment for living in such close proximity to a prostitute, “All of us who live in the adjoining houses were well aware that Adele was a harlot and thought none the worse of her for it. She was a good neighbour, discreet and kindly spoken, and so we took no notice of the men who came to visit her on a regular basis. They, too, were circumspect and all of them are, or were, in the habit of coming in the evening, after dark. To see a man knocking on Adele’s door at such an early hour drew Agnes’s attention.” She glanced at the maid and bid her relate what she had seen.
The maid was shy, but her confidence had been bolstered by her mistress’s ease of manner. “ ’Twas like Mistress Turner said, lords,” she told them. “It were early, just after Prime. I was comin’ back with the goat’s milk when I saw this man walkin’ ahead of me. I didn’t take no notice ’til he stopped and rapped on Mistress Adele’s door. After a minute or two, I saw her open it and speak to the man, and then she let him in.”
“Did you see his face, ma petite?” Roget asked.
Agnes shook her head. “He had his back to me. I could only see that he were neither short nor tall, just middlin’.”
“What about the colour of his hair, or the cut of his clothes?” Bascot asked.
Agnes flushed a deep red at being addressed directly by a man of knight’s standing, and she answered hesitantly. “I couldn’t see how he was dressed, or his face. He had a cloak on, a long one that reached the ground with a hood that was pulled up.”
“That is why I thought the man Agnes saw must have been the one that strangled Adele,” Constance Turner interjected, her voice trembling a little for the first time at mention of how her neighbour had died. “The spring weather is warm. Why would a man wear a cloak and hood on such a fine day unless he wished to mask his identity?”
She gave both men a direct glance before she went on. “It is possible, of course, that he merely did not wish to be recognised while visiting a prostitute, but it was very early in the morning for such an activity and, considering that my neighbour, from what I understand, was killed about the time that my maid saw the man at her door…”
“You are probably correct, mistress,” Bascot told her, “but without a description, it will be very difficult to identify him.”
Constance nodded to Agnes. “Tell them the rest.”
Again, Agnes blushed, but did as she was bid. “When the man lifted his hand to knock on the door, his cloak hitched up and I could see the clasp that were holdin’ the edges together at the neck. I came nearer to him while he was talkin’ to Mistress Adele and could see it plain.”
She lifted eyes shining with awe. “It was a wondrous clasp, masters, a circlet of gold bearing the image of St. Christopher! There were jewels on it, too, around the edge and on the saint’s staff.”
“Are you certain?” Bascot asked doubtfully, wondering if her youthful imagination had caused her to embellish the details of what she had witnessed. “You must have seen the clasp only fleetingly and from a distance.”
But the little maid’s insistence forced him to reject his misgivings. “I knows the blessed image of St. Christopher right well, lord,” she said earnestly, “for I carries his likeness to keep me safe whenever I goes about the town for my mistress.”
She reached inside the collar of her gown and pulled out a cheap pewter medal strung on a cord around her neck. It was etched with a crude picture of the saint reputed to protect travellers, a staff in his hand and a small child atop his shoulders. “The clasp the man wore had a picture on it just like this one,” Agnes asserted, “and, like I said, I was near enough to see it plain. I knows it was St. Christopher.”
Bascot and Roget looked at one another. This little bit of information could indeed be useful. Only a man of more than moderate means would be able to afford such an ornament and, to Bascot’s private relief, was unlikely to have been worn by a Templar. The vow of poverty each brother took on entering the Order dictated that any wealth they possessed was to be given to a family member or donated as a charitable gift before they were accepted for initiation. It was possible there might be a brother who secretly retained some of his smaller valuables, but not probable. The evidence of the gold brooch decorated with precious stones, combined with two purses each containing thirty silver pennies that had been left by the murdered harlots’ bodies, would suggest the killer was a man of considerable fortune. It was unlikely the retention of such wealth could have been kept privily in the closeness of the Templar communal routine. But while both men were grateful to the perfumer for offering her maid’s testimony, the knowledge the two women possessed could put them in danger.
“We thank you for your help, and that of your maid,” Bascot said to Constance. “But I would caution you both not to mention to anyone else that Agnes saw this man, or his clasp. If the early caller at Adele Delorme’s door was indeed the murderer, he took great pains to ensure he would not be recognised. If he believes you possess even the smallest clue to his identity, your lives may be in peril.”
The faces of both women blanched white and Agnes started to whimper. “As long as you keep silent, there
