David Wishart - Illegally Dead

Shit.

The sun was definitely on the wane when I called it a day and trudged back to the Appian Gate and an unearned but badly-needed half jug of wine. Trouble was, even if I did cut my losses now and send Alexis in, I’d queered his pitch good an proper. If someone else did turn up asking for news of the Brabbian family he’d get the bum’s rush and the lifted finger.

Bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger!

Well, at least the wineshop was empty again. I’d hit the slot between the lunchtime rush and the evening binge, when the slaughterers would be croaking cattle and stiffing sheep. The only bodies in residence were the Veturini, father and son.

‘Half a jug of the Bovillan, pal,’ I said, heaving my weary carcass up onto a stool. ‘And some of that sausage, if you’ve got it.’

The big guy hefted the wine flask and poured while I fumbled in my belt-pouch for coins. ‘Hard day, sir?’ he said, putting the jug and cup down on the counter in front of me.

‘Tell me, friend.’ I tipped the first of the jug into the cup and drank. Gods, I needed that! ‘You haven’t heard of the Brabbii, I suppose?’

‘Nah.’ He unwrapped the sausage and reached for a knife. ‘No Brabbii around here for twenty years. That right, Dad?’

‘What?’ I almost spilled my wine.

Veturinus Junior lowered the knife. ‘You okay, sir?’

‘Yeah. Yeah.’ Oh, gods! Please, please, gods! ‘Ah…that’d be the two brothers, would it? Lupus and Senecio?’

‘That’s right.’ He was looking at me strangely. Well, under the circumstances that was fair enough.

‘Proper bad lots those two were,’ Veturinus Senior said. He was still perched on his stool at the far end of the bar, but this time he had a winecup in front of him. ‘Specially Lupus. Got himself chopped for murder, did Lupus, and his brother went to the boats. My son-in-law defended them, him and his partner. Not that they could do much.’

‘You knew them, then?’ I said.

‘The Brabbii? In and out of here all the time, from when they could lift a winecup.’ Old Veturinus grinned. ‘And they lifted plenty of them, I can tell you. Senecio, he was sweet on our Veturina. I thought she might have him for a while, only she’d more sense. Then Hostilius came on the scene, and that was that.’

Jupiter! ‘They, uh, have a sister at all?’ I said.

Veturinus Junior was frowning now, and he’d set the sausage knife down. ‘What’s going on here?’ he said. ‘What’s this about?’

Well, it was a fair cop. And I couldn’t keep up the pretence of the bar-fly shooting the conversational breeze forever. On the other hand, saying that I’d been asked by the Castrimoenian senate to investigate Lucius Hostilius’s death and that the two people currently being held responsible were the Veturini’s daughter and son and sister and brother respectively didn’t seem such a sharp idea. ‘Uh…my name’s Valerius Corvinus,’ I said. ‘Quintus Libanius over in Castrimoenium asked me to look into the murder of a woman up at Caba. I thought she might be a relative of the Brabbii.’

‘What, Habra?’ Veturinus Senior said. ‘Habra’s been murdered?’

My stomach went cold. ‘There was a sister called Habra?’

‘Sure. Younger sister. Haven’t seen her for years, mind, she left Bovillae after the trial and hasn’t been back since, to my knowledge. So she was up in Caba, was she, and someone’s done her in?’ He chuckled. ‘I’m not surprised. She was the worst of the three.’

‘Yeah? And why was that?’

He made a sprinkling movement with his fingers. ‘Doctoring. You know what I mean. No one ever caught her, mind, but everyone knew she did it. Girls who got themselves in trouble, they knew to go straight to Habra.’

‘She was an abortionist?’

‘That’s the fancy name, aye. That and worse, maybe, although if there was worse she was careful. She had the trade from her mother. A proper old witch she was, when she was alive. I remember — ’

‘Did she come in here? Habra? With her brothers, I mean?’

Another chuckle. ‘Did she come in here? You hear that, Marcus? Oh, yes, sir, you couldn’t keep her out. Habra could sink a half jug with the best of them. And she was fond of her brothers, I’ll give her that. Stuck by them right the way through the trial and after all the way to the end, always back and forward to the lock-up seeing they’d enough to eat and drink. I couldn’t fault her there, she was a good sister.’

‘Your son-in-law’s partner. Quintus Acceius. He ever drop in for a cup of wine?’

‘‘Course he did, along with Hostilius. I told you, Hostilius was no stranger, he liked his wine and he only lived up the road. Didn’t come as often after he married my daughter, but until they moved to Castrimoenium the two of them’d be in here of an evening, the three of them sometimes, oh, three or four times a month, easy. That was why the Brabbii boys went to them when they got into trouble. Who else would they ask?’

‘So, uh, Acceius would know Habra, then?’

‘Well enough. Not that they were friendly, mind.’ Another chuckle. ‘Not in that way, Habra’d no time for that sort of nonsense and Acceius wouldn’t’ve looked at her twice, a good-looking man like him. But he’d know her, certainly he would. Specially come the time of the trial.’

I sat back on my stool. Bugger! The guy’d been lying through his teeth after all! And even if, for some reason, he hadn’t recognised her physically when she’d attacked him he’d known of her existence. So why had he lied? It had to have something to do with the trial; everything came back to that…

Abortionist. Acceius’s first wife had died in childbirth, round about the same time, and he’d married again, what? a couple of years later, was it? And Seia Lucinda had been quite a catch, financially, socially and probably sexually. Convenient, right? Too convenient. And much too coincidental to be coincidence…

Except that men who murder their wives, or have them murdered, don’t keep marble busts of them in their private studies. And they don’t break down — genuinely break down, as far as I’d been able to tell — when a stranger refers to the murdered woman twenty years on.

It didn’t make sense. None of it. The only thing I knew for certain was that when Quintus Acceius strangled Brabbia Habra he knew exactly who he was killing.

‘You want the sausage now, sir?’ Veturinus Junior, with the plate.

‘Hmm?’ I refocused my eyes. ‘Oh. Yeah. Yeah, thanks, pal. It’s good sausage.’

‘Real Bovillan sausage, that. You can keep your Lucanian.’

I turned back to the old man. ‘You remember anything about the trial?’

‘Nah. ‘Fraid I can’t help you there.’ Veturinus Senior sipped his wine. ‘I’d enough to do, keeping this place going, without gadding off down to the courts. And why should I? I said: the Brabbii may’ve been customers, good customers, but that was just business. I wouldn’t’ve trusted either further than I could throw them, and I poured a full cup of my best to the Good Lady Venus when my daughter split with Senecio and took up with Lucius Hostilius. Proper peeved he was at the time, but there wasn’t nothing he could do about it. She had a lucky escape, as things turned out. They were guilty as hell, and good riddance to the pair of them.’

‘The prosecutor was Publius Novius.’

‘That’s right. He was the only other lawyer in Bovillae, still is, the old bugger’ll outlast us all. Proper sharp he is, too, does a roaring trade. You don’t put much past Novius.’

‘Just how straight is he? As a matter of interest.’

The old man gummed his winecup. ‘Oh, well, now,’ he said. ‘We’re talking lawyers, sir, they’re another breed. He’s straight enough by his lights, far as I know, but like I said he’s sharp, and he knows his business backwards. Not one to let a chance slip, if you get me, so long as he thinks he won’t be caught out. Hostilius was different, I’d a lot of time for him. That partner of his, mind…well, him and Novius had a lot in common. Smart as a whip, sure, but a pusher, desperate to get on, up to every trick he could get away with and too smooth-tongued by half. No, I wasn’t too taken with young Quintus Acceius.’