David Wishart - Finished Business

Five minutes might have been pushing it, but she was back down in short order, dressed for a cold, wet January tour of the clothes shops. I got a distinctly acid look as she passed me going in the direction of the lobby. A couple of minutes later, the front door slammed hard enough to shake the paint off.

Well, that one certainly wouldn’t go down in the annals of How to Keep the Shine on your Marriage, would it?

I sighed. Bathyllus brought in the half-jug and cup, and I took a contemplative swallow.

Right. So where did we start? First, and pace Perilla, with the assumption, crazy as it might seem, that Postuma’s Alexander was more than the product of a slightly nutty middle-aged woman’s fevered imagination; that, in fact, imaginary or not, dead over three hundred years or not, the guy was worth listening to. Alexander had been fairly insistent throughout that what I was looking for was a solution to Surdinus’s murder, not the uncovering of a conspiracy against the emperor. Oh, sure, the two were bound up together, no arguments there — and in the end I’d bet that it came to the same thing — but even so there had to be a reason for the preference.

So. Given the ongoing impossibility of tracing the actual perp - our freedman friend with the scar or birthmark or whatever — it was back to my four original suspects for the role of murderer-by-proxy, the guys at Longinus’s house: Cassius Longinus himself, Valerius Asiaticus, Anicius Cerialis and Julius Graecinus. Graecinus was dead, of course — at least I assumed and hoped he was — but I’d’ve taken him off the list anyway. Conspirator or not, if he’d been lying when he’d sworn under torture that he knew nothing about Surdinus’s death then he had a lot more courage and strength of mind than I could ever have mustered. So not Graecinus.

Not Cerialis, either. Given the theory — and I could see nothing wrong with it — that X, the killer, had had Surdinus murdered because he was threatening to expose the conspiracy to Gaius, Cerialis had no motive, because he was working for the emperor himself. Oh, sure, running the chance of having their clandestine operation put in jeopardy by a premature whistle-blower might’ve been an inconvenience — I only had to think about what had happened in my own case to see that — but it surely didn’t warrant taking the guy out. He’d’ve shown himself a loyal and conscientious subject of the emperor, and a quiet word would’ve been enough. Besides, if for one reason or another that had been the way things had happened, either Felix or Gaius himself would’ve made no bones about telling me so straight out.

So not Anicius Cerialis, either. Which left Longinus and Asiaticus. And given the likelihood that the story of his adultery with Cornelia Sullana, which had provided Longinus with what paltry scraps of motive I could hang on him, was so much moonshine, plus the fact that having only been in Rome five minutes — and that by Gaius’s own doing — made him an unlikely conspirator, Cassius Longinus was a definite also-ran.

Asiaticus it was, then.

Right; what did I know about him? Seriously wealthy, ex-suffect consul but not currently political, at least according to Gaius. Had resigned his suffect-consulship five years back prematurely because — again according to Gaius — he couldn’t take the pressure. Well-connected socially: married to the sister of Gaius’s ex-wife. Whom Gaius had proceeded to seduce, then get tired of and treat her cuckolded husband as a figure of fun, giving him a very personal motive for wanting to see the emperor in an urn.

Not a lot to go on, to put it mildly. Nor did Asiaticus — as far as I knew — have a direct connection with Surdinus. In fact, if I remembered rightly, when I’d talked to Surdinus Junior he’d told me specifically that his father hadn’t known Asiaticus except by name. Still, he’d certainly been a friend — or at least an intimate — of Julius Graecinus, who was one of Surdinus’s closest pals, and given that Graecinus was a co-conspirator, it’d explain why …

I stopped, frowning. Hang on; things didn’t add up here. The theory was that, for reasons best known to themselves, and forget the whys and wherefores, the conspirators had decided to recruit Lucius Surdinus — mistakenly, as it turned out, because the guy turned out to be a loose barrel in the hold and had to be got rid of. Now if Asiaticus was our man X — the murderer-by-proxy — then we had a major logical problem. The original decision to bring Surdinus on to the team could only have been made by someone who knew him well enough to decide that he’d be sympathetic to the cause. And that could only be Graecinus, because apart from him, out of the remaining members of our Gang of Four, only Longinus qualified, and even if Longinus was a member of the conspiracy in its latter stages he was out of the country at the time. Logically, then, Graecinus must’ve known at least of Surdinus’s initial involvement, however deeply that went, because he’d’ve done the recruiting himself. Or at least advised on it.

So far so good.

Only at that point the whole thing gets wobbly, because that’s where Graecinus’s knowledge of the situation stops. Or ostensibly stops, anyway. Which brought us to three possible scenarios.

First, Graecinus had been telling the truth, and the connection between Surdinus’s murder and the conspiracy was a complete mare’s nest from start to finish. Possible, sure, but for all kinds of circumstantial reasons as likely as a snowfall in July. File and forget.

Second, that when the guy had sworn to me that he knew nothing about Surdinus’s death or the identity of his killer, despite all Felix’s torturers could do and the prolonged, unbearable pain, he’d been lying through what few teeth the bastards had left him. If you could credit him with that much sheer persistent courage then that scenario made perfect sense: although Valerius Asiaticus might’ve been under suspicion at that point, he was a long way from Gaius’s sliding table, and one word from Graecinus would’ve put him on it before you could say ‘rack’. Me, I doubt if I could’ve done the same, given the circumstances, but I had to admit it was a viable possibility.

Third scenario, the really interesting one. Back, in a way, to the first: that when Graecinus had said he knew nothing about Surdinus’s murder he’d been telling the absolute truth. Not, though, this time because the dead man and the conspiracy weren’t connected, but because X was working to his own agenda; the decision to have the guy killed and the arrangements for his actual murder were made on his own authority, without the knowledge and agreement of the others. If that was the case, then we were faced with what could be an entirely new ball-game: unless X — Asiaticus — was playing things off his own bat, which was pretty unlikely, then he was working for or with someone else. In other words, what we had was a conspiracy within a conspiracy, one that was still up and running, and one that neither Gaius nor Felix knew about. And, presumably, I had until the Palatine Games in eight days’ time to crack the problem.

Shit. Score one for Alexander.

I took a long swallow of the Special.

So, what did I do now? The most sensible course of action, naturally, would be to take the whole boiling straight to Gaius, or to Felix, at least. Where treason was concerned, they were the experts, and if the plot went ahead and succeeded then it was Gaius himself who’d get the chop. Only I couldn’t do that, could I? Not yet, anyway. First, because it was only a theory with nothing to back it up; second because Gaius himself had told me in so many words that as a conspirator Asiaticus was a non-starter, and given the emperor’s current mental state I wasn’t stupid enough to risk contradicting him. The third reason, though, was the clincher: I’d seen what happened to treason suspects first-hand, and there was absolutely no way I was about to finger Asiaticus — or anyone else — to Felix when I wasn’t a hundred per cent cast-iron sure of the bastard’s guilt myself. Absolutely no way.