Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

“Greek?”

“Doesn’t say,” Orestes replied, “but he’s a freedman with a half-Greek name, so presumably yes. Loads of Greek merchants in Rome nowadays. Anyhow, in the normal course of business that jar of sprats would’ve stayed in his warehouse for months.” His eyebrows, unusually thick, lowered and squashed together. “Which makes no sense.”

I nodded slowly. “If you’re right about the murder as a statement,” I replied.

“Unless,” Orestes went on, looking up sharply, “whoever did it knew the extra weight would break the crane, in which case — ” He looked at me, and sighed. “A bit far-fetched?”

“As wine from Egypt,” I said. “Of course,” I went on, “someone could’ve sawed the beam part-way through.”

“That’s — ” He looked at me again. “You’re teasing me,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Fine. In that case, it makes no sense.”

“If,” I reminded him, “we approach the problem from the diplomatic-statement direction, as you seem determined to do.”

He gave me a respectfully sour look. “In the circumstances …”

He had a point, of course. “It would seem logical to assume that it’s something to do with politics and diplomacy,” I conceded.

“Exactly. So we should start from there.” I sighed. “No,” I said. “We should start from the beginning.”

We took a walk. On the way there, we discussed various topics — Pythagoras, the nature of light, the origin of the winds — and paused from time to time to let me rest my ankle, which hasn’t been right since I fell down the palace steps. We reached Agathocles’ house just before midday, a time when I was fairly sure he’d be out.

“I’m sorry,” the houseboy confirmed. “He’s at the palace. Can I tell him who called?”

“We’ll wait,” I said firmly.

Of course I’d been there before, many times. I knew that Agathocles lived in his father’s old house, and his father had been nobody special, a cheese merchant who was shrewd enough to buy into a grain freighter when the price was right, and then reinvest in land so his son could be a gentleman. I can only suppose Agathocles liked the place; happy childhood memories, or something of the sort. It was a small house, surrounded by a high wall, on the edge of the industrial quarter. If you stood on the street outside the front door, you could smell the tannery round the corner, or the charcoal smoke from the sickle-blade factory, or the scent of drying fish on the racks a hundred yards north. An unkind friend described it as pretentiously unpretentious, and I’m tempted to agree. Inside, you could barely move for statues, fine painted pottery, antique bronze tripods. It looked rather more impressive than it was because the rooms were so small, but even so, the collection represented a substantial amount of money, leaving you in no doubt that the great man lived where he did because he wanted to, not because he couldn’t afford anything better.

It was an old-fashioned house, too; rounded at one end, with two main rooms, for living and sleeping. The upstairs room, more of a storage loft than a gentleman’s chamber, was presumably a legacy of Agathocles’ father’s business activities, a dry and airy place to store cheeses, with a door opening into thin air, like you see in haylofts. The house stood in the middle of a larger-than-usual courtyard, half of which had been laid out as a garden, with trellised vines and fruit trees, herb beds and an ostentatious row of cabbages. The other half, shaded by a short, wide fig tree, was for sitting and talking in, and a very attractive space it made. It was surrounded, as I just told you, by a wall, and the reports said that on the fatal evening, the guards had stood all round the outside of the wall, with a sergeant minding the gate.

“Not good,” Orestes said sadly. “Not good at all.”

I concurred. I could see no way in which anyone could have scaled the wall — coming in or going out — without being seen by the guards, even in the dark; also there were sconces set in the wall for torches, and hooks for lanterns, and the report said that the courtyard had been lit up that night. Well nigh impossible, therefore, for Naso to have slipped out past the guards; equally implausible that anyone else could have climbed in to kill him.

“Bad,” Orestes said.

“Quite. If Naso was killed — ”

He looked at me. “If?”

“If,” I repeated, then shrugged. “It must have been one of the people in the house at the time. Agathocles, his two aides, the two Romans, or the domestics. As you say,” I added, “bad for us.”

Orestes walked to the foot of the wall and stood on tiptoe. “Then how did they get rid of the body?” he said.

I smiled. “That,” I said, “is probably the only thing standing between us and war.”

He jumped up, trying to grab the top of the wall. He was a tall man, like I said. He couldn’t do it. “Maybe they hid the body,” he said, “and came back later.”

I shook my head. “Naso’s secretary and the guard-sergeant searched the house,” I reminded him. “And it’s not like there’s many places you could hide a body. I’m morally certain that Naso was off the premises when the house was searched.”

“But the guards were still in place. They’d have noticed.”

“Yes,” I said, and sat down, slowly and carefully, under Agathocles’ rather splendid fig tree. My neck isn’t quite as supple as it used to be, so I couldn’t lean back as far as I’d have liked.

“You think,” Orestes interpreted, “the body was in the tree ?”

I smiled at him. “The outer branches overhang the wall,” I said, “And it’s a fact that when people are looking for something, they quite often don’t bother to glance up. But no, I don’t think so. Even if you were standing in the upstairs door — ”

“What? You know, I hadn’t noticed that.”

“Which proves my point,” I said smugly. “You didn’t look up. I noticed that door as soon as I walked though the gate, but I don’t think it’s relevant in any way. It’s nowhere near the wall, and it’s too far for anybody, even a really strong man, to throw a dead body from there to the tree.” I frowned, as a thought slipped quietly into my mind, like a cat curling up on your lap. “We ought to take another look inside,” I said. “I believe our problem is that we’ve been searching for what isn’t there rather than paying due attention to what is. Also,” I added, “we suffer from the disadvantage of noble birth and civilized upbringing.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “I’ll tell you when I’ve worked it out.”

We snooped round the house for a while, ending up in the upstairs room. Nothing obvious had caught my eye; no bloodstains, or tracks in the dust to show where a body had been dragged. I sat down on an ancient cheese press, while Orestes sat at my feet on a big coil of rope, the image of the great philosopher’s respectful disciple. That made me feel like a complete fraud, of course.

“A grown man,” I said, “walks out of a drinking party — ”

“Staggers out of a drinking party.”

“True,” I said. “But he was used to being drunk. And he took the flute-girl. What about her, by the way?”

“What about her?”

“Has she turned up? Or has nobody thought to ask?”

Orestes shrugged. “I expect that if she’d been found they’d have held her for questioning.”

That made me frown. Call me squeamish if you like; I don’t like the notion, enshrined in the law of every Greek city, that a slave’s evidence can only be admissible in a court of law if it’s been extracted under torture. It gave the wretched girl an excellent motive for running away, that was for sure — assuming, that is, that she knew that something bad had happened, and she was likely to be wanted as a witness. “Let’s consider that,” I said. “I’m assuming Hiero’s had soldiers out looking for her.”