David Wishart - Solid Citizens

‘Boss around, pal?’ I said. ‘I’m not a customer. It’s business.’

‘I’ll check, sir,’ he said. ‘If you’d like to wait here?’

‘No problem.’

He padded away into the interior. I took off my sodden travelling cloak, hung it up to drip on one of the pegs behind the door, and cast an assessing eye over the lobby itself. The decoration was predictable stuff, at least the painting on the main wall was, a frieze of self-consciously bare-breasted dancing girls brandishing tambourines above their heads and wearing what looked like fringed bootlaces round their middles. Someone had scrawled a graffito in the corner recommending Phyllis. I hoped she wasn’t the squint-eyed one immediately above the lettering, but if the frieze was intended to show who the establishment had on offer it was so old and worn that in any case the lady was probably a grandmother by now. Upmarket here we definitely weren’t. Still, Bovillae was only a provincial town with a limited clientele, so you couldn’t expect too much.

The slave came padding back. He was at least as old as the frieze.

‘The mistress says that’ll be fine, sir,’ he said. ‘If you’d like to follow me I’ll take you to her.’

We went down a corridor with doors on either side. One of them opened as we passed, and a girl in the obligatory bootlace but without a tambourine looked out briefly, grunted, and shut it again. At the end of the corridor, before it took a turn to the left, the old guy stopped and opened the final door.

‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Just go in.’

After the lobby I hadn’t been expecting anything fancy, but I was met with a comfortable, well-lit sitting room hardly bigger than a cubbyhole, most of which was taken up by a couch with a woman lying on it reading a book. Not a bad looker, late thirties, well made up and wearing an impressively coiffured wig, with a Coan silk scarf wrapped round her neck.

The woman laid the book on the table. The scarf slipped down a little as she bent forward, and in the light from the lamps I caught a glimpse of the scar tissue it covered, the red, puckered flesh of a serious burn. It wasn’t, from the look of it, all that old either.

‘This’ll be about the murder, will it?’ she said.

Business-like and to the point. ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ I said.

‘I was expecting someone to drop round. Pull over that stool behind you, sit down and make yourself comfortable.’ I did. ‘Carillus, the customer in Number Five’s time is up. Give him a knock in passing, please.’

‘Yes, madam.’ The old guy closed the door at my back. I could hear him shuffling off back down the corridor, then the sound of a double-knock.

The woman was giving me a long appraising look.

‘You aren’t local, are you?’ she said finally.

‘No,’ I said. ‘The name’s Marcus Corvinus. I’m just visiting from Rome. Castrimoenium, not Bovillae.’

‘Mm.’ I had the feeling she was filing the information away carefully for future reference, and her eyes hadn’t moved from my face. ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Andromeda. Opilia Andromeda.’ A freedwoman; yeah, well, it made sense for a brothel-keeper, although I’d’ve thought she was pretty young not only to have her freedom but to be the owner of a business into the bargain. ‘So why you, Marcus Corvinus?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘As someone to be looking into a Bovillan murder. Why a visitor?’

I shrugged. ‘Because Silius Nerva of the local senate asked me to.’

I got the distinct impression that the answer hadn’t satisfied her, which was fair enough because it didn’t really say anything. Still, the really interesting thing was that she’d asked the question. I gestured at the book beside her.

‘Anything interesting?’ I said.

She frowned. ‘Oh, just a bit of Alexandrian froth. I need to be here all day to keep an eye on things, and I have to pass the time somehow.’

Yeah, right. Only I’d caught a glimpse of the tag on the roller before she’d put the book down, and it’d looked more like a copy of Plato’s Gorgias to me. In the original. Sure, it was none of my business how she spent her mornings, and she could read what she liked as far as I was concerned, but even so it was interesting that she’d taken the trouble to lie. I filed that one away on my own account.

‘Well, then.’ She raised herself on the couch and turned to face me fully. ‘Back to the business of the old man’s murder. What do you want to know?’

‘Anything and everything you can tell me.’

‘Such as what, to start with?’

‘Was he a regular customer?’

‘Over the past two or three months, yes, fairly regular. Before that, only occasionally.’

‘The past two or three months? Why just then?’

‘His wife died in September. That could have been the reason — it sometimes is, with a certain type of client — but I really can’t say for definite.’

Delivered coldly and clinically. She could’ve been a doctor giving a case history. ‘He was, uh, quite active for his age, then?’ I said. Nerva hadn’t told me what that had been, but if he’d been elected censor he must’ve been touching sixty, at least, and she’d referred to him as an old man, so it seemed a logical deduction.

‘Well, now, Corvinus.’ Andromeda smiled and lowered her head. ‘That isn’t a question I can answer personally. You’d have to ask Lydia.’

‘Who’s Lydia?’

‘His favourite partner. Oh, he’d go with one of the others willingly enough when she wasn’t available, but he always asked for her.’

‘Was she the girl he was with the evening he died?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Could I talk to her now?’

‘Certainly, if you want. She’s occupied at present, but she shouldn’t be long. When you’ve finished with me I’ll fetch her for you.’

‘Thanks. That’d be great.’

‘So.’ Her hand went to the silk scarf, and she tugged it back down until it covered her lower neck completely. ‘What can I tell you myself?’

‘Just the basic background details would be useful. Nerva didn’t give me any of those.’

‘Yes, well, he wouldn’t, would he?’ She smiled. ‘All this is so dreadfully sordid and embarrassing for him and his cronies in the senate, is it not? A prominent man like Quintus Caesius being found dead outside a brothel.’ I said nothing. ‘Which details did you want exactly?’

‘The time frame, for a start. When did he arrive and leave?’

‘He arrived just after sunset and left about an hour later.’

‘That his usual time for visiting?’

‘Yes. Or perhaps slightly earlier than usual. He never came before sunset, when the shops in the alleyway were open and there would be people to see and recognize him. A very cautious man, Quintus Caesius. One of his most signal traits.’ This time she didn’t smile, but it was there in her eyes.

‘And he always left through the back door?’

Andromeda laughed. ‘But of course! Corvinus, he was a highly respected and very familiar public figure! Cloaked and hooded or not, there was always a chance that he’d be known. He came in that way, too, by arrangement. It’s very private; if you’d carried on past this room and round the corner you would’ve seen that for yourself.’

‘How so?’

‘There are no bedrooms between it and here; Lydia’s is the first, and that’s immediately next door to us. In fact, I suspect that was why the girl was his favourite, and it was a matter of convenience and safety as much as personal preference.’

‘The door isn’t used otherwise? By the customers, I mean.’

‘Oh, yes. On occasion, and for the same reason. Don’t be naïve, Corvinus; Quintus Caesius wasn’t — isn’t — the only important man in Bovillae who makes use of our services, and as you can imagine the town’s great and good are not very keen to bump into an ordinary client, or use the front entrance on the main street and run the risk of being seen. So we have a special arrangement for our special guests. I can easily hear a knock on the back door from here, and I open it myself; not even Carillus is involved, so it’s all done very discreetly. Discretion is something that I pride myself on, and our more special clients know it, which is why they continue to be our clients.’