Mike Ashley: The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

Orestes grinned. “Fair enough. I wouldn’t imagine it’d be an easy search. For a start, how would they know who to look for?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Explain,” I said.

“One slave-girl looks pretty much like another.”

“But her owner — ” I paused. “Who owns her? Do we know?”

Orestes took another look at his notes. “One Syriscus. Freedman, keeps a stable of cooks and female entertainers, hires them out for parties and functions. Quite a large establishment.”

I nodded. “So it’s not certain that Syriscus himself would recognise her. It’d be an overseer or a manager who’d have regular contact with the stock-in-trade.”

“Presumably.”

“And he,” I went on, “gives a description to the patrol sergeants: so high, dark hair, so on and so forth. Probably a description that’d fit half the young women in Syracuse. So the chances of finding her, if she doesn’t want to be found — ”

Orestes nodded. “Pity, that,” he said. “Our only possible witness.”

“And if she had seen anything,” I went on, “and if she managed to get outside the wall — if she had the sense she was born with she’d run and keep on running.” I sighed. “She must’ve got out somehow, or she’d have been found. Now we’ve got two inexplicable escapes instead of one.”

“Unless,” Orestes pointed out reasonably, “they escaped together.”

I shook my head. “A joint venture,” I said. “Co-operation in the achievement of a common purpose. I don’t think so. Naso gets drunk and fancies a quick one with the first girl he can lay his hands on. He carries her outside, they do the deed, and then they put their heads together and figure out a way of scaling the wall and evading the guards, something beyond the wit of us two distinguished scientists. And we’re sober. No, I don’t think so at all.”

Orestes nodded. “So?”

“So,” I concluded, “I don’t think Naso got out; I think he was got out by a person or persons unknown. In which case, the girl was got out too.”

“Because she was a witness?”

I shrugged. “Why not just kill her and leave her lying?” I asked. “Come to that, why disappear Naso, rather than just cut his throat and save the bother of moving the corpse over such a discouragingly formidable series of obstacles? And as for the jar of sprats — ” I shook my head. “Words fail me,” I said.

Orestes grinned at me. “I think,” he said, “that Naso climbed out and took the girl with him over the wall. No, listen,” he added, as I started to object. “I can’t tell you how he might have done it, but he was a soldier, maybe he was good at silently climbing walls and evading guards. Maybe he thought it’d be a lark. Anyway, he and the girl sneak out somehow. And once he’s outside, roaming around the city, that’s when he’s killed and stuck in the jar, which happens to be the handiest hiding-place at the time.”

“Motive?”

“How about robbery?” Orestes said hopefully. “Nothing political, just everyday commercial crime. You get an honest hard-working footpad who sees this richly dressed drunk weaving his way through the Grand Portico in the middle of the night. Our footpad jumps the drunk, but the drunk’s a soldier and he fights back, so the footpad hits him a bit harder than he’d normally do and kills him. In a panic, he drags the body into a nearby warehouse and dumps it in a suitable jar.”

I was impressed. “Which reminds me,” I said. “Do we know who the jar belonged to? We know who the buyer in Rome was, but how about the seller?”

Orestes consulted his notes. “Stratocles,” he said. “General merchant.”

I nodded. “I know him,” I said. “He’s got a warehouse — ” I frowned. “Address?”

Orestes looked up at me. “Just round the corner from here,” he said.

“At last.” I smiled. “Something that actually makes a bit of sense. All right,” I went on, “this robbery hypothesis of yours.”

“It fits all the known facts.”

“It covers them,” I pointed out, “like a drover’s coat. It’s not what you’d call a tailored fit.”

Orestes gave me an ‘all-right, be like that’ look. “It covers the known facts,” he said. “And it has the wonderful merit of being nothing to do with politics and diplomacy, which gets Syracuse off the hook. Also,” he added, with a rather more serious expression, “it’s the only explanation we’ve got, unless we’re prepared to entertain divine intervention.”

I stood up. “Well done,” I said. “You know, I told Hiero you’d be perfectly capable of dealing with this business on your own. But would he listen?”

“Did you really?”

“At any rate,” I said, as I walked to the open door that led to nothing at all and cautiously peered out, “it’s a working hypothesis. Of course, you’ve missed out the one thing that might just possibly prove your case.”

He looked startled. “Have I?”

I grinned and pointed at the coil of rope. “You’re sitting on it,” I said.

His eyes grew round and wide. “Of course,” he said. “Naso threw this rope into the tree!”

I picked the iron clamp off the cheese press. “Possibly using this as an improvised grappling hook.”

“And they climbed along the rope to the tree, and dropped down from the overhanging branch on to the other side of the wall.”

“Having chosen a spot, or a moment, with no guard present. Quite,” I said. “Solved your mystery for you. Of course,” I added, “you haven’t yet explained how the rope and the clamp got back in here, neatly coiled up and put away.”

“Damn,” he said. “Does that spoil my case?”

I smiled at him. “No,” I said. “It makes it interesting.”

The next day I thought about my king, my patron and my friend, Hiero of Syracuse, and the Romans. I also thought about war, and truth. Then I sent out for a secretary — I get cramp in my wrist these days if I write much — and dictated a report on the case. It was essentially Orestes’ theory, though I left out the rope and the cheese press, and a few other things. I fleshed it out a bit, for the benefit of any Romans who might read it (I felt sure that some would), with various observations of a scientific nature. Human strength, for example, and the limitations thereof. Agathocles, I pointed out, was a small man, past middle age. Even if he’d been able to murder a seasoned Roman soldier (by attacking him when his back was turned, for example), there was no way he could’ve disposed of the body, not without help. Such help could only have come from the domestics, since his two advisers and the remaining Romans had left the party together. As for the domestics — the cooks — they’d been thoroughly interrogated in the proper manner, were slaves, could hardly speak Greek and had never been to Agathocles’ house before. They left shortly after the guests, and they all agreed that none of them had been out of the others’ sight all evening. It was just possible that Agathocles, having murdered Naso, could have suborned them all — it would’ve had to be all of them — with bribes to help him with the body, but I left it to the common sense of the reader to conclude that it was highly unlikely. If Agathocles had wanted to kill Naso, surely he’d have laid a better plan and made sure he had his helpers in place before the event, rather than relying on recruiting slaves he’d never met before. The same, I more or less implied, held true of the servers, who were also from Syriscus’ agency. As for the flute-girls, including the one carried off by Naso, they could be ruled out straight away, since mere slips of girls wouldn’t have been capable of manhandling Naso’s substantial body. Therefore, I concluded, if Naso hadn’t been removed from the house by anybody else, he must’ve removed himself. That proposition established, the likeliest reconstruction of events, I suggested, was the one set forth in my report.