Marilyn Todd - Second Act

*

Up in Frascati, the woodsman’s grisly find had caused quite a stir.

‘Who is she?’ the townspeople clamoured. ‘How was she murdered? What shall we do with her? When did she die?’

The woodsman, who knew all about nature red in tooth and claw, was able to provide some of the answers to the crowd which had packed into the tavern at the crossroads. From his experience with rotting remains, he pronounced sombrely, the victim had been in the earth a month at least. He did not add that his sole brush with buried corpses, as opposed to wild animal remains, came from accidentally digging up Xerxes’s predecessor when he was planting his cabbages. Instead, the woodsman allowed himself a refill of unwatered wine on the house.

‘The cause of death was definitely that spade we found on top of the grave,’ he added, wiping his callused hands down his hide leggings as though wiping away the memory of the hideous discovery. ‘Someone really clobbered her with it, too. Skull smashed like an eggshell.’ The woodsman pointed to the side of his head. ‘Right here.’

‘Poor cow,’ said the barber. ‘Let’s hope it were quick and she didn’t see it coming.’

The woodsman found images of her long black hair and shattered face haunting his every waking hour and preventing him from sleeping. His wife said he must tell someone about what he had found, but who was there to tell? Frascati had no army barracks nearby, no resident magistrate, he could hardly post a notice on the wall of his house. Found. One body. Please enquire within. In the end, he had summoned his friends to help him.

‘Spade, you said?’ The ostler from the post house frowned. ‘You know, now I thinks about it, some time around about the back end of October, I do believe some bugger stole one from right outside me stables.’

The ostler didn’t know it yet, but his role in the girl’s murder would haunt him for the rest of his life. Even though the post-house slaves dug carrots for the horses every day, he would come to think that he should have somehow ensured that the spade was locked safely away. Irrational and ridiculous, but the ostler would go to his grave feeling that he’d been responsible for the girl’s death, never forgiving himself for leaving the murder weapon out in the open.

‘Was she-’ The fuller cleared his throat. ‘Was she raped?’

A heavy silence fell over the tavern.

‘She were naked, weren’t she?’ growled the blacksmith.

This time the silence was even heavier. No one touched their wine.

‘At least we can rest easy that she weren’t one of us,’ the woodsman’s wife piped up at last. ‘I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s better for the town that both the victim and the killer were strangers.’

Terrible to say, yes. But natural. A murmur of guilty agreement rippled round the tavern. Heads hung down. Feet shuffled.

‘I suppose she was a stranger?’ the fuller asked.

‘Well, of course she was,’ the barber replied. ‘We’d have noticed if one of our own women had gone missing, you daft oaf!’

‘No, no, I didn’t mean that. I was just remembering that time when one of Senator Cotta’s slaves ran away. The one who screamed her bloody head off when they caught her.’

A different kind of silence gripped the tavern now.

‘She had long, dark hair,’ the fuller reminded everyone.

‘So do lots of women,’ the barber said carefully. But he, too, remembered her well from the fight she put up. Her screechings, kicks and protests had drawn a wagonload of attention that afternoon. Which, for a town at the junction of three main roads to Rome and long accustomed to drama, had to be quite a show to draw a crowd, especially when it came so hot on the heels of the old man blowing himself up, although it was before Senator Cotta had gone swanning off to Cumae to consult with the Oracle.

‘There was talk she’d run away a second time,’ the potter said.

‘So there was.’

Memories surfaced now. Of the Senator’s men searching high and low for a girl who had effectively disappeared off the face of the earth. Now they knew why. The earth itself had claimed her ‘If she was that important to him, I’d best send word to the Senator,’ the woodsman said. ‘Tell him we’ve found her body.’

But he wasn’t really concerned about how crucial the slave girl might or might not have been to Sextus Valerius Cotta.

The harrowing image of the hand plopping from his dog’s mouth refused to leave him, and it wasn’t much of a leap of the imagination to picture any number of pretty young women taking their last walk with this killer. A smooth operator, the woodsman thought, who could win a girl’s trust so completely that she’d followed someone wielding a spade meekly into the woods. What an actor that person must be!

What worried the woodsman more than the past, though, was the future.

That the killer had already marked out another victim. And was simply waiting for the right moment to strike.

Damp from the air mingled with the damp from the river, cloaking the city in a cold, dark blanket of grey. The tramontana might have relented, but the moist air it left in its wake carried sickness and disease disguised as a mantle of softness. Lungs would soon start to clog, just as surely as the damp would smuggle in fevers, rheumatics, colics and piles, and steadfastly refuse to heal sores. At times like this, the Roman people looked to two sources to safeguard their health and that of their children.

One was religion. Money (from the rich), garlands (from the poor) would be left for Aesculapius at his temple on the island in the Tiber, for Aesculapius was the god of medicine and healing, and it was to him they looked if sickness descended. Carna’s shrine up on the Caelian Hill would be inundated with cakes of fat bacon and beans in the hope that the goddess who watched over their vital organs might make them stronger, if she was propitiated accordingly. And they would pour solemn libations to their family gods with the prayer, ‘Admit no plague or sickness into this household. If disease comes to our threshold, make it stay there.’ However, the populace was well aware that the Immortals would be rushed off their feet in times of crisis and, even though they’d hedged their bets three ways, it was still possible for their entreaties to slip through the divine net. Hence the second arm of the pincer.

Armed with potions and ointments, tablets and suppositories, the trickle of visitors from the herbalist’s door was slow but steady as Orbilio and Dymas approached.

‘Trust me, mate, we have to do this,’ Dymas said, his hobnailed boots echoing dully on the timbers of the Sublician Bridge.

‘The rape only took place yesterday morning.’

The people who visited the herbalist were not rich. Their coarse cloaks were patched, their sandals made from woven palm leaves rather than leather, and the men wore beards, since they were not in a position to afford barbers. Yet they were prepared to hand over what, to them, were vast sums of money for poultices and infusions, indemnity against the inevitable.

‘I know, but you said yourself we don’t have any fresh leads. Bloody fuck, mate, we need Deva’s statement or we’re screwed.’

Orbilio knew Dymas was right, but calling on the poor girl so soon after the attack felt like another assault. Unfortunately, time wasn’t on Marcus’s side. This morning another girl had fallen victim to the Halcyon Rapist. More lives had been destroyed by this monster. Panic was filling the streets. As much as it went against his personal and professional grain, he had caved in to his colleague’s demands.

‘We’ll take it slowly,’ he told him. ‘See how it goes.’