David Wishart - Illegally Dead

Valeria Marilla gives greetings to her adoptive parents Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus and Rufia Perilla.

Hi, how are you? Thanks for the books you sent, especially (Clarus says to be sure to tell you) the replacement for his father’s Rhizotomica that Corydon ate. Everything here is much as usual. Aunt Marcia has had a bit of trouble with her knee again but she says the liniment Clarus brought round is working really well; also Laertes’s piles are improving, although I’m not supposed to mention them. Dassa caught another cold at the end of last month (!), but Clarus and I have been feeding her hot grain mash and giving her regular chest rubs and an evening cup of mulled Caecuban so barring the usual croaking and sneezing she’s not too bad. Placida’s settling down nicely after that unfortunate business with Cloelia Secunda and the topiary hedge, although you’ve still got to watch her with next door’s mastiff and both households now keep a bucket of water handy for what Aunt Marcia calls their Mutual Bouts of Unacceptable Behaviour. Clarus is still working on her flatulence problem (Placida’s, not Aunt Marcia’s) since the charcoal pills I mentioned in my last letter don’t seem to be having the effect he hoped for, quite the reverse — Clarus says this is a pharmaceutical anomaly, but there you are. On the positive side, now we’ve fenced off the pig run the rolling problem seems to be under control. More or less.

Oh, and by the way, please could you come down here as soon as possible? Clarus thinks there’s been a murder.

So there we were, in Castrimoenium, three days later, in the atrium of Aunt Marcia’s villa: me, Perilla, Marcia, Marilla, young Clarus and Clarus’s father Hyperion, the local doctor and pharmacist.

I don’t go much for doctors, myself, especially at the dinner table where after the third top-up they tend to lie glowering at you over their lettuce and making snide remarks about an imbalance of humours, but Hyperion’s okay. For a start his full name’s Publius Cornelius Hyperion, and despite the Greek bit on the end he’s as Roman as they come, or Latin, anyway: the family’ve been settled this side of the Adriatic for over two centuries, since his great-whatever-grampa was handed the citizenship by a grateful senate for curing General Scipio of a nasty boil on the bum just in time to let him fight Zama in comfort, thus giving us Carthage and a large slice of Africa. Or at least that’s what their family tradition says. Which meant a refreshing absence of facial hair and a ditto presence of good Italian common sense.

I could take young Clarus as well, which was lucky because over the two years that I’d known him he and Marilla had become a permanent item: a quiet-spoken, serious kid streets away from the fluff-brained lads-about-town we got in Rome. Good looking, too. Certainly Marilla thought so, from the way she couldn’t take her eyes off him, and the attraction was obviously mutual.

‘Right.’ I held up my winecup for the hovering Bathyllus to refill; as usually happened when we came to visit, Marcia had sent her own ancient piles-afflicted major-domo Laertes to stay with her freedwoman in Baiae for the duration. ‘So tell me about this murder, then.’

‘Possible murder.’ That was Aunt Marcia, from her usual stool — stool, mark you, not chair: no decadent back rest for Perilla’s Aunt Marcia — beside the portrait bust of her late husband Fabius Maximus. The old girl might’ve been in her eighties, but mentally she was needle-sharp, and where accuracy was concerned she didn’t take prisoners. ‘Please bear the distinction carefully in mind, because Hyperion has no actual proof of foul play. Do you, Hyperion?’

‘No. None at all.’ Hyperion shifted his lanky six-foot body on the guest-couch he shared with Clarus. ‘The man was a patient of mine by the name of Lucius Hostilius.’

‘Senior partner in a local law firm.’ Marcia again. ‘The local law firm, in fact.’

‘So how did he die?’ I said.

‘He was poisoned,’ Hyperion said. ‘At least, I think he was.’

I leaned back against the overstuffed cushions and tried to keep my expression neutral. Bugger! Well, that explained the guy’s reluctance to make the accusation formal and why he’d got Clarus and Marilla to fetch me from Rome, anyway. If you were a dead man’s doctor then bringing up the question of poison was juggling with razors. Where poisoning were concerned, doctors were the first suspects in line.

‘Not exactly poisoned, Dad,’ Clarus said.

Hyperion grunted. ‘Quite right. I’m sorry, Corvinus, I stand corrected. No, there was no actual poison involved, not as as such. But I’m very much afraid that I supplied the means of death myself.’

Oh, hell; this did not sound good, not good at all. To break the eye contact, I lifted my winecup and took a slow sip. It was Marcia’s best Caecuban, or what Dassa the oenophilic sheep had left us of it anyway.

‘Perhaps, Hyperion,’ Perilla said carefully, ‘you’d better explain things from the beginning.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ Hyperion touched his own cup on the table beside him but took his hand away without lifting it. The guy was clearly worried as hell, and in his position I didn’t blame him. ‘Well, then. I was treating Hostilius for chest pains and palpitations, and had been for several months. The medicine was in a bottle near his bed, a ten day supply which I’d renewed only two days before. Five days ago — late morning, to be exact — one of his slaves knocked me up to say that his master had suffered a fit and would I come at once. By the time I arrived it was too late and the man was already dead.’

‘You’re sure the death wasn’t natural?’ Perilla said.

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I’m not sure, not at all. That’s just the problem. When I began treating Hostilius my initial prognosis was that although the condition was fatal in itself with appropriate medication and strict attention to diet he might live for another two or three years, perhaps even twice that. However’ — he paused — ‘the signs showed that he had died from a seizure typical of the final stages of the disease, so that prognosis could have been wrong. Could well have been wrong, because the gods know we’re not infallible.’

‘But?’ I said.

‘Oh, yes. Certainly there is a but. After I’d inspected the body I checked the medicine bottle. It was almost full, as it should have been, but the medicine was a clear liquid. When I tasted it it was water.’

Uh-huh. ‘And if Hostilius had drunk the original contents — all of them — the effect would’ve duplicated the seizure?’

‘Yes. More or less exactly.’

‘So you think someone gave him the full dose and refilled the bottle?’

‘Yes. At least, that’s what I’m afraid of.’

‘Would that have been possible?’ Perilla said. ‘Practically speaking, I mean?’

‘Oh, yes. Hostilius took the medicine in spiced honey wine, so what taste it had was masked almost completely. He wouldn’t have noticed all that much difference from the usual, especially if he gulped it down, which he normally did. The effects wouldn’t be immediate, either.’

‘But you didn’t tell anyone about the bottle at the time?’ I said.

‘No, Corvinus, I did not. And I won’t.’

‘If Dad reports it,’ Clarus put in, ‘all the slaves’ll be tortured for their evidence, maybe even killed if the torture leads nowhere. That’s the law.’

Shit. Yeah, right, that is the good old Roman law, at least technically, and I’d done Hyperion an injustice because the guy wasn’t worried on his own account at all. Where the master of the house dies under suspicious circumstances his slaves are automatically assumed to be hiding crucial information about the death; information that, to be deemed valid, has to be extracted under torture. And if that doesn’t produce results then as presumed accessories before, during and after the fact the whole household — men, women and children — are liable to execution. On principle, and to make sure that any other slave thinking of murdering his master or covering up for a pal who does gets the point. Roman law doesn’t play games with slaves gone to the bad; it can’t afford to.