The Templar Heresy

27

Stephen Taverner’s body was discovered a little after midday. The Englishman had failed to check out — he had only booked the room until noon — or to answer the telephone on three separate occasions, and this had concerned the reception staff because he had told them he was intending to catch an afternoon flight to London.

What’s more, one of the room service waiters had failed to return to the kitchen after delivering two room service breakfasts, and the manager was far more concerned about that minor mystery. After repeated knocking on Taverner’s door, he used his override key card to open the door and found himself looking at the breakfast trolley standing in the room close to the dead body of the Englishman.

It wasn’t the first time the manager had discovered a body in a hotel room, though it was the first time he’d encountered somebody who’d very clearly been murdered, and he knew the drill. There was not the slightest point in checking the corpse for a pulse — even to a layman and at a distance it was obvious that the man had been dead for some time — so, shocked as he was, he did what the training manual told him to do.

He had already touched the outside door handle with his bare hands, so he knew his own fingerprints would be on it, and if he touched the inside handle he would probably smudge any prints the departing killer might have left. So he didn’t do that. What he did do was use his internal communicator to contact the reception desk and tell them to call the police and an ambulance, and to explain that a man had been murdered, giving the room number.

The response from the carabinieri, relayed to the manager from reception desk, was exactly what he had expected. The room was to be sealed, nobody allowed in or out, and the police were on their way.

The manager had already used his handkerchief to close the door, and he then summoned a porter from the lobby to stand outside it until the police arrived. His mission to find the missing waiter then took on a new urgency. Unless the waiter himself had murdered the Englishman for some reason and then fled — which seemed extremely unlikely — then something else must have happened to that man.

The search didn’t take long. In a linen closet at one end of a corridor, the manager discovered the silent and unmoving body of the missing man, crouched down on the floor on his hands and knees, almost as if he was praying. The manager’s cursory examination showed a complete absence of blood, but a very obvious red mark around the dead man’s neck indicated that he had been either strangled or garrotted.

When the carabinieri arrived outside the hotel, to the inevitable accompaniment of a self-generated fanfare of sirens and squealing tyres, the manager was waiting for them in the lobby to explain that the body count had doubled since his staff had made the initial call.

‘Before we go up to the room,’ he said to the two senior detectives, ‘you need to know that I’ve just found a second body, a member of my staff, hidden in a linen closet, and it seems fairly clear to me that the two cases are related.’

‘We’ll be the judge of that, thank you,’ the senior carabinieri officer snapped. ‘There could be any number of explanations for two bodies being found in the same hotel on the same day. There’s no need to look for a connection that isn’t necessarily there.’

‘Of course,’ the manager replied equably. ‘I’m just not entirely certain how many unconnected explanations there can be that will explain a dead waiter stuffed in a linen closet and missing his jacket, nametag and badge, and a man shot to death in a room down the corridor, a room in which I also found the waiter’s jacket and the breakfast trolley. But,’ he added with a smile, ‘you men are the experts, not me. Shall we go up, gentlemen?’

Two hours later, both bodies had been certified as dead, by far the easiest and shortest part of the entire proceedings, and had then been removed after dozens of photographs had been taken of the corpses in situ. The specialist investigators had then moved in to examine the two established crime scenes while another group searched for the third one. There was no doubt that the Englishman — his passport identified him as Stephen Taverner — had been murdered exactly where he was found, but the situation with the waiter was different. He could have been marched at gunpoint down the corridor and into the linen closet and strangled there, or he could have been attacked somewhere along the corridor itself. But the carpet and beige walls had so far revealed no signs of a struggle at any point.

A team of detectives was already looking at the hotel CCTV recordings, but without any particular expectation of finding anything, because the coverage was very limited, basically just a couple of cameras on each floor beside the lifts which provided a few shots of the corridors towards the bedrooms. Numerous people had been seen entering and leaving the building throughout the night — an entirely predictable characteristic of an airport hotel — and the vast majority looked like tourists or businessmen.

Inevitably, the unexpected arrival not only of several police vehicles but also of the vans and cars belonging to the crime scene investigators attracted the attention of the press, and the barter system immediately began to bear fruit for the reporters. They quickly found that chambermaids and cleaners, working for the minimum wage, were only too happy to share what they knew — or what they thought they might possibly have heard, in many cases — in exchange for folded high-denomination euro notes. News of the murder was broadcast on the local radio stations around lunchtime, and went out on the wires to other media outlets during the afternoon.

By that time, the only piece of information that was not publicly available was the name of the dead Englishman, simply because the Italian police were making arrangements to inform his family in the UK before the news broke.