David Wishart - Illegally Dead

I stood up and retrieved the plate of cheese and olives — mostly olives now: Gabba wasn’t too keen on these — plus the wine jug and cup. If that was all I was going to get then I might as well go back inside. Just as I moved to the door, the door up above at the top of the staircase leading to Pontius’s second storey opened.

‘Come on, Corvinus.’ Gabba was suddenly right behind me with his own jug and cup. ‘If you’re going in then go.’ He pushed me through and closed the door behind us.

‘What the hell!’ I said.

‘Sorry, consul, tripped over my own feet.’

‘Gabba — ’

‘Concatenation of circumstances, boy. Purely fortuitous, and you have my abject apologies.’

‘You want a top-up, Corvinus?’ Pontius said.

‘No. No, I’m fine.’ Jupiter! I carried the jug, cup and plate, minus a couple of the olives that hadn’t made it across the threshold, back over to the bar. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Beg your pardon?’

‘You branching out, Pontius? Running an illegal gambling den or something upstairs that you don’t want the authorities to know about?’ He looked at me blankly. The other two punters set down their winecups and stared at me too, like I’d sprouted an extra pair of purple ears. I sighed. ‘Never mind; it doesn’t matter.’

‘What doesn’t matter?’

That was Gabba. I turned to look at him: blank stare number four on full power. Bugger. Whatever it was, it was obviously private Castrimoenian business, the locals had closed ranks and Roman purple-stripers could just put up the blinds and go home.

‘It,’ I said. ‘Whatever the hell it is it is not…fucking…important. Just leave it. Okay?’

‘You feeling all right?’ Pontius said frowning.

I poured a cup of wine and sank half of it at a gulp. ‘Bugger off, sunshine.’

‘You want to watch that stuff, Corvinus,’ Lounger B said. ‘It rots the brain.

Well, there was a fair slice of the afternoon left before the dinner gong; plenty of time to pick up one of the case’s loose ends. Clarus had said that Bucca Maecilius had a carter’s business near the Caba gate. Since I was in Castrimoenium anyway I might as well pay the guy a visit, see what he had going for himself.

I found the place easy: a patch of waste ground that stood out like a rotten tooth in what was otherwise a respectable edge-of-town street. There was a wall fronting it, sure, but it hadn’t been replastered for years and the iron gates that should’ve closed the entrance looked rusted open on their hinges. ‘Business’ was dignifying it. Not a profitable concern, obviously.

I went through the gates past a couple of tarpaulined carts parked next to a tumbledown stables.

‘Anyone around?’ I called.

A guy came out of the stables holding a hay-rake; a big guy, fat as lard, bald as a coot and no youngster: I’d put him sixty, easy, and not a well-preserved sixty, either. He was wearing a tunic that might’ve had a colour at one time but hadn’t seen the inside of a wash-tub for months. The same might be said for the guy himself.

‘Yes?’

‘Bucca Maecilius?’

‘That’s me.’ He squinted; short-sighted, too, to add to his charms. ‘You want to hire a cart?’

‘Uh-uh. Name’s Valerius Corvinus. I was wondering if I could have a word with you.’

‘What about?’

‘Quintus Libanius of the senate has asked me to look into Lucius Hostilius’s death. The lawyer.’

‘Is that so, now?’ He leaned the hay-rake against the stable wall and came over. He didn’t look too friendly. ‘What’s it got to do with me?’

‘I understand you had a…talk with Hostilius and his partner seventeen days ago at their office.’

‘Yeah. And?’

‘Care to tell me about it?’

‘Why should I?’

‘Oh, because from what I heard it ended in a shouting match and seven days later your little friend Cosmus interfered with Hostilius’s medication and stiffed the guy. Nothing particularly crucial.’

He was glaring at me. ‘You accusing me of being mixed up in that? Because if so — ’

‘You knew Cosmus, then?’

‘Yeah, I knew Cosmus.’ There was a trace of uncertainty in his voice now. ‘So did a lot of other people.’

‘You have any names, maybe?’

He shook his head. ‘Look, Corvinus, if that’s who you said you were,’ he said. ‘Let’s start again, okay? I’ve got nothing to hide. You want to ask me about that day I went round to Hostilius’s office, you go ahead.’ He jerked his chin towards a bench beside the stable door. ‘Take a seat. We might as well be comfortable.’

I followed him over and we sat down. ‘It was about a second will you say your father made, wasn’t it?’ I said.

‘He made it, sure enough. Four days before he died. Told me so himself, the next day.’

‘He give a reason?’

‘He didn’t need a reason! I was his elder son, he owed me!’ I looked at him. ‘Yeah, well. He said his conscience was troubling him. We’d never got on, sure, but blood’s blood and he didn’t want to cause trouble after he was dead.’

‘Did you see it?’

‘No. But he told me what was in it. A fifty-fifty split between me and Fimus, everything right down the middle. That was fair, I’d’ve had no quarrel with that. He said he had to have it witnessed first, then he’d take it round to his lawyers and make it official.’

Uh-huh. Well, “Lucky” had been cutting it fine, if this had happened three days before the lightning got him. Not that he was to know that, mind, but it’d be all of a piece with the rest of the old bugger’s sense of timing. One of nature’s true incompetents, Gabba had called him, and he’d been spot on. ‘And did he? Give it to his lawyers, I mean?’

‘Dad never broke a promise in his life.’ He glanced sideways at me. ‘Look, I don’t know, right? Not for sure. But he said he would, okay? That’s enough for me.’ For all his sixty-odd years his voice had the petulance of a child’s. In fact, half-close your eyes and you might just believe that Bucca Maecilius was a great hairless whining baby.

‘What about the witnesses? If he’d had it witnessed I’d’ve expected that they’d’ve come forward.’

‘Don’t you believe it, Corvinus! They’re bastards in this town, they’ve got it in for me, the lot of them.’

‘So you went to Hostilius and Acceius and accused them of suppressing the will.’

‘I’d reason. Dad said he’d give them it. Besides, they’re no shining lights, that pair. Hostilius was straight enough before he lost his roof-tiles but for all Quintus Acceius sets himself up as a model of virtue these days he’s cut a neat few corners in his time.’

I blinked. ‘Uh…has he, indeed? Such as?’

‘You talk to Novius. He’ll tell you.’

‘Novius?’

‘Publius Novius, in Bovillae. My lawyer.’ He said the word with pride, stressing it.

Right: Fuscus had mentioned him, I remembered. Not with a great deal of underlying respect, mind, or that was the impression I’d got. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Novius turned out to be the guy Acceius had been alluding to when he’d said that he could name certain lawyers not too far away who encouraged their clients in litigation. A certain amount of professional rivalry there, I’d imagine, if not outright antagonism, which might, lawyers being lawyers, explain things. Still: Acceius cutting corners, eh? Interesting…

‘Why should Hostilius and Acceius suppress a second will?’ I said. ‘What’s in it for them?’

‘Acceius. Not Hostilius, I’d got nothing against him. You ever heard of a guy called Aulus Decidius? Little guy, dwarf, but one of the richest bastards in Latium.’