Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

I’m afraid I missed the rest of the speech. Two of Hiero’s men took me politely by the elbows and walked me out of the room, before I could say anything.

On my way home, Orestes and I stopped off at Stratocles’ warehouse. It was a huge place, and the nearest uninhabited building to Agathocles’ house. Inside, there were more jars than I’ve ever seen in my life. There were sealed jars, rows and rows of them, ready to be loaded and shipped. There were empty jars, sent back to be washed out and refilled. There were damaged jars waiting to be hauled off and dumped in the bay, and two long lines of half-filled jars, containing the preservative oil but as yet no sprats, standing by to be stoppered and sealed with pitch.

I stood next to one of these — it was about two fingers’ width taller than me — and tried to imagine lifting a dead body high enough to drop inside it. It’d take several men.

“Come on,” Orestes said sadly. “This part of the evidence isn’t in dispute.”

“I guess not,” I said. “I’d still like to know why sprats, though.”

“Excuse me?”

“The body was bound to turn up sooner or later,” I said. “When the jar was opened. I grant you, it was sheer chance that it ended up in Rome. Even so — ”

I didn’t finish the sentence because at that point I slipped and nearly ended up on my face. The floor was slick with oil. Someone had tried to blot it up with sawdust, but hadn’t been thorough enough.

Orestes grinned at me. “Archimedes’ principle of the displacement of fluids,” he said. “I read about it at school.”

I gave him a look. “I’m guessing,” I said, “that this is where the body was tipped in, and the displaced oil came gushing out. He was a big man, so there was a lot of spilt oil.”

“Quite,” Orestes said. “So where does that get us?”

I wiped oil off the sole of my sandal with the hem of my gown. “Nowhere,” I said.

The next day, Orestes came to see me. I sent word that I didn’t want to talk to anybody. He insisted. I pointed out that I was having a relaxing, well-earned bath, in which I hoped to dissolve every trace of the air I’d been forced to share with Publius Laurentius Scaurus. Orestes came in anyway, and sat down on the floor looking sadly at me and not speaking.

“I told Hiero,” I said. “I didn’t want to get involved.”

“You’re involved all right,” Orestes said. “They’re demanding your extradition.”

I’m not a brave man. I squealed like a pig. “Hiero’ll never agree.”

“No,” Orestes said, “he won’t. And that means there’s going to be a war. Which,” he added, with a faint shrug of his shoulders, “we’ll almost certainly lose, unless you can think of a way of blasting the Roman fleet out of the bay. Pity about that,” he added.

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not my fault.”

“Nobody said it was,” Orestes replied gloomily. “Still, that’s one thing I never thought I’d see.”

“What?”

“Archimedes,” he said, standing up. “Outsmarted by a Roman.”

He was just about to leave. I called him back. “I don’t suppose,” I said, “you’ve still got your file on Naso.”

He grinned at me. “As a matter of fact,” he said, and pulled out the papers from under his tunic.

I sighed. “Read them to me,” I said. “My eyesight — ”

So he read his notes on the life and times of Quintus Caecilius Naso, up to a point where I told him to stop and go back a bit. He read that bit again, and I asked him some questions, which he was luckily able to answer.

“You wouldn’t happen to have,” I said quietly, “anything similar on our friend Scaurus?”

“Wait there,” he said.

The bath was getting cold when he came back, but I hadn’t bothered to get out. I’d been too busy thinking; or, rather, bashing helplessly at the locked door of my intuition, behind which I felt sure the answer lay …

“Publius Laurentius Scaurus,” Orestes said, peering owlishly at the paper in his hand. “A member of the influential Laurentii family, once prominent in the Optimate movement, though their influence has been on the wane for the last twenty years or so. Married to the second cousin of the celebrated Aemilius — ”

There was a lot more of that sort of thing. I was partly listening, the way an old married man partly listens to his wife. At the same time, my mind was hopping, flapping, until suddenly and quite unexpectedly, it soared.

“Got it! [1] In Greek, Eureka ” I remember shouting. “Here, help me out, I’ve got to see Hiero.”

Which I did, refusing to wait, or see anybody else. I barged my way into the royal presence and told him all about it. Then I said, “Well?”

A pause; then Hiero said, “You’re right.”

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

Hiero nodded slowly. Then he lifted his head and looked at me. “Archimedes,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Why haven’t you got any clothes on?”

In contrast to our previous encounters, my third meeting with Scaurus was distinctly low-key. There were just the three of us, in a small garden at the back of the palace. We sat like civilized men under a fine old beech tree, and a boy served wine and honey cakes.

Hiero — he was the third member of the party — wiped his lips delicately on a linen napkin and gave Scaurus a friendly smile. “I asked you here,” he said, “to see if we can’t work something out. Something sensible,” he added. “Just the three of us.”

Scaurus nodded gracefully. “I can’t see why we shouldn’t be able to,” he said. “If you’re prepared to be realistic.”

Hiero nodded. “And since you’re such an admirer of my cousin’s work,” he went on, “I’ve asked him along. I know you’ve had your differences, let’s say, but I feel sure that deep down, both of you men of science, you can really talk to each other. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Of course,” Scaurus said. “And you’re right. The very greatest admiration.”

I acknowledged the compliment as best I could. “Maybe,” I said, “we could have a chat about scientific method.”

A slight frown crossed Scaurus’ face. “I’d have thought we had rather more urgent — ”

I raised my hand. “Method first,” I said, “then the specifics.”

He shrugged. “If you like.”

“What I admired about that paper of yours,” I went on, “wasn’t the actual conclusions, which are fanciful, or the empirical data, which is deeply flawed. No, what I liked was the approach . Confronted, you said, with various different explanations for an observed phenomenon — all of which fit the facts equally well — logic requires that we choose the explanation that calls for the least number of new assumptions. Is that right?” I asked nicely. “My Latin’s nothing special, but I think that’s what you said.”

He looked at me as if he didn’t like me nearly as much as he used to. “More or less,” he said.

“In other words,” I went on, “the simplest explanation is likely to be the right one.”

“That’s not actually what I — ”

“Near enough,” I said firmly, “is good enough. In which case,” I went on, “try this. The simplest explanation for what happened to Naso isn’t that he climbed the wall on his own, or that this mysterious and wonderful flute-girl of yours winched him over the wall on an improvised crane. The simplest explanation,” I said, beaming at him like the rising sun, “is that when he came outside to shag the flute-girl, he found the sergeant of his honour guard waiting for him. The sergeant killed him, and a couple of squaddies lugged him out through the open gate and put him on a cart, to be disposed of later in a nearby warehouse. Well?” I asked him. “Simple enough for you?”