David Wishart - Illegally Dead

I had to hand it to the defence, Hostilius and Acceius, who’d evidently done their best to cast doubts on the reliability of a pack of witnesses who were pissed as newts and hadn’t actually seen the two guys coming out of the shop. However, the facts that Lupus had a record of violence and petty thievery a yard long already and that he and his brother had been barrelling up the street like a pair of Phaedippideses after Marathon were pretty well clinchers. The jury found them both guilty as charged. Lupus, as the probable ringleader, got the strangler’s noose and Senecio a twenty-year stretch in the galleys. End of trial, end of record.

I set the tablets down and took a large gulp of the sub-standard Signinan. Yeah, well, it added up, in general terms anyway: Senecio does his stint behind an oar, survives it against all the odds and comes back with a grudge to pay against the two guys who’d defended him. Or failed to, rather. None the less, there were serious holes in the logic that needed filling. It sounded like a fair cop, for a start: the two had been convicted on circumstantial evidence, sure, but as it stood that was pretty damning. Even if by some wild stretch of the imagination they had been telling the truth, Senecio couldn’t complain that his advocates hadn’t done their best with what they’d got. He’d a right to feel angry against the jurymen who’d returned the verdict, yeah, no argument, or against the judge who’d done the sentencing; but not against Hostilius and Acceius, not to the degree of hunting them down twenty years later. That took real hatred, and unless he was totally out of his tree — which was a possibility, I admitted, after twenty years in the galleys — I couldn’t see he’d have a valid reason for it. Odd.

The second major hole was that with Lupus and Senecio both dead there should’ve been no one left. So who the hell had tried to put a knife into Acceius? Someone had, that was sure, and the chances there wasn’t a connection were pretty remote. Oh, the probable answer was obvious: a relative, a third brother perhaps, here in Bovillae, that Senecio had been in touch with before the attack. He wouldn’t’ve been involved in the affair, so naturally the trial record wouldn’t mention him, but with two brothers dead now — the second killed by Acceius personally — he’d have a grudge in spades. I remembered the guy Trophius had mentioned, the guy who’d been hanging around the tombs when Trophius’s lads burned Senecio’s body. Right. That fitted as well. He’d’ve wanted to be there, at the funeral — if you could call it that — but if he’d been planning then, as he would’ve been, to pay off his brother’s killer, plus the back-debt, there was no way he’d’ve come forward and shown himself properly…

It all made sense. The only question now was, how did I find him? I took another swig of the wine, the last, and emptied the cup.

Dyers. The record had described the brothers as ‘dyers from Bovillae’. It was a long shot, sure, twenty years long, but at least I was lucky there. Dyeing’s one of those professions that tends to go in families and stay there. Dyers, fullers and tanners largely keep to themselves, sticking to their own special area of town, because the raw materials of the trade can be pretty niffy when stored in bulk or put to use. In fact, there was a clear-cut dyers’ and tanners’ quarter in Bovillae. I could -

I stopped. Something was tugging at my memory; nothing to do with Bovillae or Senecio. Tanners’ quarter…tanners’ quarter…

Then I remembered. Acceius had said that the night he was attacked he’d been visiting a client in the tannery and slaughterhouse area of Castrimoenium, out by the Bovillan Gate. Shit! There had to be a connection! The guy could’ve moved, it was only four or five miles; would probably have moved, under the circumstances, with two of his brothers — we’d assume brothers — convicted of murder. He wouldn’t’ve changed his profession, though, there was no need for that, none at all…

Still, if I was going to find him then I needed a name. There was no point starting afresh with Castrimoenium, not when I’d got a lead here. I could come back tomorrow and ask around the dyers’ shops by the Appian Gate. If I was really, really lucky, then someone might just remember, and in that case we were in business.

Of course, there was that one, other possibility, that our mystery knifeman hadn’t been a knifeman at all. But then, tempting to pursue as that line might be, before you can start faffing around with complications you’ve first got to check the obvious.

Yeah, well: enough for the present. If that was my day in Bovillae then I’d had it. I left the empty cup on the table, returned the tablets to Latro with thanks, collected the mare from her long stint at the water-trough and set off back to Castrimoenium.

I called in at Hyperion’s in passing just in case Clarus was there — Marilla had told me the day before that he had something to tell me re the dead woman up at Caba — but he wasn’t, so the odds were he was helping Marilla on Meton-dogging duties and I’d catch up on both of them later. Hyperion, though, had two interesting pieces of news: one, that Libanius had put Veturina under the gentlest form of house arrest he could officially manage; and two, that Castor had flown the coop for a second time.

‘He has what?’ I said. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Oh, quite sure.’ We were in Hyperion’s workroom, and he was doing something complicated involving a lot of mixing and grinding of tiny quantities of dried herbs from stoppered pots. ‘According to Scopas — and he sent word to Libanius — he packed a bag and left shortly after Libanius did, without saying where he was going, why or for how long. Veturina might know the answers to any or all of these questions, in fact she probably does, but she refuses to say.’

‘Bugger!’ That Veturina had killed Hostilius, or connived at his death, purely out of love I could accept, absolutely; Castor, however, was much more of a grey area. Oh, sure, in my report to Libanius it hadn’t been up to me to make fine distinctions of guilt between them, and I’d been very loath to think along those lines in any case, under the circumstances: their motives — individual and shared — had been like one of these compact masses of underground roots that Alexis had shown me once, so tangled together that the plants and the weeds they belonged to were impossible to separate. All I could do, like Alexis, was dig the whole lot up, good and bad mixed, then hand them to Libanius to unravel as best he could. Even so, if one of the pair could be regarded as a proper murderer — and I wasn’t forgetting Cosmus — then Castor was it, no question. And now the bastard had done a runner and left his sister to face the music on her own.

‘It was to be expected, of course.’ Hyperion added a little water to the powdered herbs in his mortar and began to grind them to a paste. ‘He has very little to lose in any case, no property to be sequestrated, no family apart from Veturina herself. At least no family that he’d bother about, or who’d bother about him. No doubt he’ll take ship from Puteoli for Gaul, or Spain, somewhere suitably remote, and that’ll be the last anyone hears of the fellow.’

Shit, what a mess. ‘Libanius isn’t putting out the word on him?’

‘No. Definitely not. To tell you the truth, Corvinus,’ — Hyperion used a tiny metal spatula to transfer the paste into a pill-mould — ‘I suspect he was angling for something just like this. Libanius is a very astute man, in the political sense. With Castor escaping from justice the whole business, or the more unsavoury aspects of it like Cosmus’s murder, can be laid at his door unequivocably, and Veturina left out of the picture. He has become, as a Jewish colleague of mine would once have said’ — he pressed the mixture hard down into the mould — ‘a scapegoat. In the word’s best possible sense.’