Rosemary Rowe - A Coin for the Ferryman

I could see the force of that. With his pale, blond looks and that red uniform, any forest bandit would see him coming half a mile away, and Niveus was built for decoration rather than self-defence. Even giving him a weapon would not have helped a lot — he was too small to wield a dagger to very much effect. I unwillingly abandoned my little theory.

The girl was still anxious to be helpful, though. ‘You could speak to Aulus, the front gatekeeper, perhaps. He’s a fairly horrid person, brutal as a bear, but he does see everything that’s passing in the lane, and he speaks to all the visitors, of course.’

‘Thank you. That’s a very good idea.’ I did not mention that I knew the gatekeeper of old. He had been a spy for Marcus once, before my patron bought this villa for himself, and I had already determined that I would speak to him. He still had the informer’s habit of noting everything, so I was prepared to brave the stinking breath, though it would cost me something if he had news to tell. Aulus also had an informer’s instinct for reward.

The slave girl smiled. ‘I’m glad to be of use. My name is Atalanta, by the way. If I do hear anything, I’ll try to let you know.’ She led the way towards the further gate, ready to usher me into the stable yard.

I paused before going through it. ‘And there isn’t any gossip in the house at all? None of the slaves has anything to say? No rumours about unusual incidents? No guesses about who the victim is?’ Usually, when there is a homicide like this, there are a hundred different theories in the servants’ hall — most of them completely impossible, of course, but occasionally there is something which can give a lead.

Atalanta shook her head. ‘Not as far as I know. It’s quite a mystery. Of course we took it for a peasant, till Stygius saw the hands — and even then we thought it was a girl. But now. .’ She shrugged. ‘Everyone seems completely baffled, even the senior slaves, who usually pretend that they know everything.’

I had to smile at this. I have spent long enough as a slave to recognise the type. I would have given her a coin, but I still didn’t have a purse — I had given mine to Lucius earlier — so she had to be content with a smile. ‘You have been very helpful. I shall remember that,’ I said, dismissing her, and went into the outer courtyard on my own.

Stygius had stationed himself in front of the building where the body lay, and I saw that he had armed himself with an ancient wooden hoe — though whether this was to ward off curious eyes, or to protect himself from phantoms, it was difficult to say. The door to the room had been left ajar again, and I could faintly see the flickering candles and the shrouded form.

When he saw me Stygius came lumbering across. ‘Ah, there you are, citizen. I thought you would come back.’ He looked at me with curiosity. ‘Have they decided what they’re going to do with that?’ He jerked a thumb towards the dead man as he spoke. ‘I thought yon Lucius would have persuaded them to light the pyre at once.’

‘I think they were waiting to see if there was any news.’ I left an opening for a comment, but he offered none. I prompted him again. ‘From those land slaves of yours who were sent out earlier, asking questions around the neighbourhood.’

Stygius looked mournful. ‘Most of them are back. But they’ve nothing to report — or nothing of any interest, anyway. They’ve been, between them, to all the major homesteads locally. Of course, they were asking the wrong questions — they were only enquiring about a missing girl — so perhaps it’s not surprising. And being only land slaves, and not proper messengers, they could only ask the servants and the doorkeepers in the main. You couldn’t expect rich people to invite them in.’

I nodded. ‘Well, they did their best and it was worth a try. Servants will often talk to other slaves much more freely than they’ll talk to an official visitor.’

He spat thoughtfully. ‘You might be right, at that. In fact, if there was a young man unaccounted for, perhaps my land slaves would have heard. They have come back with all sorts of stories about missing dogs and goats — to say nothing of someone’s ancient grandfather who keeps wandering off and has not been seen for days.’

This was delivered in so lugubrious a tone that I found myself smiling. ‘But no young people?’ I enquired.

Stygius looked surreptitiously towards the corpse, as though it might overhear him. ‘No one that could possibly be him. They found a Celtic freeman whose daughter ran away, but it turns out that he’s had a message since, saying that she’d met a man, and gone off with a troupe of travelling entertainers in a cart. And there was another household who had lost a kitchen girl. They were the only ones who asked the land slaves in. The owners wanted to make enquiries in case we’d heard of her.

‘They think she’s run away?’ I was surprised. This was a serious matter. The punishment for a captured runaway was death.

‘It seems she broke a lamp and was afraid of being flogged — she’s very young. Her owners have got the town guard on the watch for her. She’s been branded, and she’s got the usual slave disc on a chain round her neck saying who she belongs to, so she won’t get very far — it would take an ironsmith to strike that off. But the other servants say their mistress is unkind, and often had her beaten till she was black and blue, so she may have gone to throw herself on someone’s mercy in the town.’

‘Claiming protection?’ The law did make exceptions in a case like this, where an owner was unjustifiably cruel, provided that the fugitive put herself under the protection of another master straight away. ‘In that case her owner might certainly suspect she had come here — Marcus is famously kind to his slaves.’

He nodded. ‘But we hadn’t seen her — and it couldn’t be our corpse, even when we still thought it was a girl. Those hands did not belong to any kitchen slave, and anyway the missing girl was only eight years old.’

‘I see.’ I was sympathetic to the girl’s predicament, but Stygius was right. This didn’t help us with the case in hand. ‘But no young men at all?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, citizen,’ he murmured, as though it were somehow his fault that the enquiries had failed. ‘Though there is still a chance. There are one or two land slaves who haven’t yet come back — some of the neighbouring properties are miles away and of course they had to walk.’

I nodded. ‘Well, send for me if you hear anything at all. In the meantime, I’ll go and have a word with Aulus at the gate. It occurs to me that if anyone passed this way in a cart, Aulus would have seen them from his vantage point.’ Aulus had a cheerless little cell beside the gate, where he could sit and shelter, but still have a view of any traffic in the lane. ‘I imagine that whoever hid our victim in the ditch must have used some kind of transport to move the body — unless they somehow killed him on the spot. And there has been no sign of bloodstains there, as far as I’m aware.’

Stygius gave his slow, considered nod. ‘That’s true, when you come to think it out. It wouldn’t be easy to disguise a thing like that on the back of a donkey or a mule, and if it had been wrapped in something they’d have buried it like that. Or you would have thought so, anyway. And if it was a stranger, as you seem to think, he’d have had to take it steady down an unfamiliar lane. Aulus would have had a chance to get a look at him.’

I frowned. ‘I wonder what a stranger in a cart was doing in the lane. The only reason to come down this way is if you have business here. Most people would take the military road — it’s a great deal easier than these steep and winding lanes, even if you have to clear it when a messenger goes by, or there’s military traffic of some other kind. Wagons take a dreadful jolting where the roads are bad.’ I was remembering my own exacting journey here today, and others of a similarly bruising kind I’d made before.