David Wishart - Solid Citizens

‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘Like I told him outside, he’s got to learn to share. This isn’t his house; he’s a guest, even if he is one below stairs. Lupercus is the major-domo here, and there’s an end of it. He’ll just have to accept that.’

‘Do you think he will?’ Perilla said.

‘Maybe not. But that’s his problem, unless he wants to be shipped back to Rome and spend the festival there. I told him that, too.’

‘You ever happen to notice the interesting thing about thumbprints, Corvinus?’ Clarus said. ‘Any fingerprints, really.’

‘What?’ I looked at him blankly. Shit, you expected non sequiturs like that from airheads like Priscus, but Clarus was the solid, no-nonsense, sensible type.

‘They’ve got sort of whorls, and every one’s just that little bit different.’

‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘So?’

‘So if someone picked something up, like a silver tray, like Lupercus did, and left a fingerprint on it, you’d be able to tell who’d done it. Picked up the tray, I mean.’ He was looking at the expression on my face. ‘Because if you got him to leave another fingerprint on something else and compared the two it’d prove that … I mean, you’d know …’ We were all staring at him now. He tailed off and cleared his throat in embarrassment. ‘Or there again maybe you wouldn’t. Forget it. It was just an idea.’

Gods! And I’d thought Priscus was bad! ‘You been talking to Alexis, pal?’ I said. Our clever-clever gardener had this theory that you could breed better peas by using a small brush to smear the pollen from one plant inside the flower of another one. The philosophy of it seemed fairly run-of-the-mill conventional, no problems there — something about each grain of pollen containing the element of bigness or hardiness or whatever embodied in the whole plant — but it wasn’t a comfortable thing to watch, especially when he explained it in terms of male and female.

Clarus shrugged. ‘Yes, well,’ he said. ‘Like I said, it was only an idea. Never mind. It doesn’t matter. So. Back to the case. What comes next, Corvinus?’

‘Bread-and-butter procedural stuff,’ I said. ‘Just doing the rounds of the names on the list. I’ve got to see the guy who had the argument with Caesius a couple of days before he was killed. Quintus Roscius. Then there’s the elusive brother, the town drunk or whatever, and Publius Novius, our old pal the dodgy lawyer. Also, I’d like to know more about why exactly the nephew had his knife in. Like I say, there’re plenty of leads, and Caesius seems to have put a lot of people’s backs up.’

‘As long as you remember, dear, that we are on holiday,’ Perilla said. ‘And Priscus and your mother will expect to see something of you when they arrive. You can’t be away in Bovillae all day from breakfast to dinner. It isn’t polite. Particularly since it’s Priscus’s birthday while they’re here.’

‘Gods, Perilla, they only live up the hill from us in Rome! It’s not as if we don’t see them at other times.’

‘Not very often. Only for the occasional meal.’

‘That’s out of self-preservation, lady. It’s not so bad when they come to us. But when you go round to their place to eat you take your life in your hands.’

‘Nonsense, Marcus! Phormio’s an excellent chef.’ She paused. Perilla can be pretty dogmatic, sure, but at root she’s fair and honest. ‘In his way. By his own lights. Within certain parameters. It’s simply that he can be rather too … inventive at times.’

Inventive . Well, that was one word for the bastard. It wouldn’t be the one that I’d choose, mind. Still, there was no point in starting an argument I knew I couldn’t win. ‘Oh, incidentally,’ I said, ‘I picked up something for the birthday boy when I was in town.’ I reached for my purse, took out the ivory plaque, and handed it over.

‘But that’s lovely!’ Perilla said, examining it. ‘Where did you get it?’

‘A little antiques shop near the market square. Owned by a guy named Baebius. Coincidentally, he was at daggers drawn with Caesius as well.’

‘We’ll give him that, then. I’d got him a copy of Varro’s Antiquities , but that’ll do for a Festival present. An antiques shop, you say? That’s quite unusual for a country town like Bovillae, isn’t it? Of course, there are a lot of incomers buying up the old estates, so I suppose there’s more of a market for luxuries these days.’

‘You know the Satellius one’s just been sold?’ Clarus said. ‘Trebbius was telling me.’ Trebbius was one of Clarus’s regular patients, a card-carrying hypochondriac and prime source of up-to-the-minute local gossip. ‘Some bigwig in the Roman civil service. At a pretty good price, too. Trebbius didn’t know the man’s name, but he’s converting the old farmhouse into a top-class villa. Three dining rooms, landscaped garden, the lot. The Satellius family’s been a fixture around here for generations, but the offer was just too tempting.’

‘I think it’s a shame,’ Marilla said. ‘All the little working farms are going. We’ll soon be just a holiday-home suburb of Rome.’

‘Well, that’s progress,’ I said. ‘You can’t …’

Lupercus and Bathyllus came in together, both carrying loaded wine trays.

‘Uh … what’s going on, pal?’ I said to Bathyllus. ‘Serving the wine needs two of you?’

He sniffed. ‘According to your instructions, sir, and in the interests of peace and harmony we have reached an amicable compromise. I will serve you and the mistress, while the … local staff will attend to the rest of the household. I trust that is acceptable?’

Oh, gods, acceptable ? It just sounded plain bloody childish and silly to me. Nevertheless …

I looked at Clarus. He nodded wearily.

‘Yeah, OK, little guy,’ I said. ‘So long as it works, do it however you like. But just be careful, because you’re skating on very thin ice here. Lupercus, you all right with this?’

‘Yes, sir.’ I noticed that he didn’t look at Bathyllus. Still no love lost there, then. Well, we couldn’t have everything. And I’d settle for peace and harmony, even if it did mean getting childish and silly into the bargain.

‘Fine. Marvellous.’ I sighed. ‘We’ll give it a try, for what it’s worth. Now wheel in the main course, will you, before we starve to death. And no demarcation disputes over who pushes the bloody trolley.’

Bugger. Life between now and the end of the festival, when we could decently go home and get back to normal, was going to be fun, fun, fun. Not only that, but we’d still got the joys of Mother and Priscus to look forward to.

Thank goodness I’d got a case to work on. Say what you liked about a murder investigation: at least it was clean and straightforward. It’d get me out and about, anyway.

I went back into Bovillae the next day after breakfast.

First on the list of things to do was talk to Quintus Roscius. Nerva had told me his farm was on the Castrimoenium side of town, so once Bovillae was in view I stopped to ask a guy clearing out the drainage ditch at the edge of a field next to the road for directions.

The farmhouse turned out to be an old building a few hundred yards up a dirt track; quite a sizeable property for the extent of the holding, although most of it, of course, would be storage sheds plus roofed-over areas for the grape press and threshing floor. Roscius evidently kept it in good condition, despite its age; there were new tiles on the roof, the walls were whitewashed, and the yard in front was tidy and swept, with two or three plump chickens strutting about pecking for grain.

I dismounted and knocked at the door. It was opened by a good-looking woman in her mid-twenties with a toddler clinging to the hem of her tunic and staring at me, thumb in mouth.