David Wishart - Solid Citizens

Shit; weren’t any of these guys straight?

I’d have another talk with Quintus bloody Baebius tomorrow.

I left it later than usual to make the trip into Bovillae, intentionally so, setting off a good hour after breakfast. Which, I was glad to note, despite Mother and Priscus being in evidence, was blessedly free of Phormio’s gunk. Over dinner the previous evening Clarus, with uncharacteristic firmness, had ignored Mother’s strident protests that as a medical man himself he should be encouraging his guests to eat a healthy breakfast and put his foot down on that score: Phormio had been barred from using the kitchen to so much as boil an egg pro tem, which, considering that the bastard’s eggs of choice came from crocodiles and had been shipped over from Egypt in jars of sand, made it a reasonable place to start. Where that left us vis-à-vis the actual Winter Festival dinner, mind, was still a moot point: it’d take a much braver man than Clarus — or me, for that matter — to go head-to-head with Mother when she was dead set on something, and that particular sword of Damocles was still hanging. We’d just have to hope for divine intervention. Or maybe a major earthquake.

So. Since he lived in the top part of town, it had to be Baebius first. The guy had questions to answer, not only in regard to the dodgy plaque his freedman had sold me but also as to why he hadn’t mentioned the fact that he and Caesius shared membership of a Roman club. I dumped my horse as usual at the Tiburtine Gate water trough and went straight round to his house, only to be told that that he was out.

‘You know where he might be at all?’ I asked the young door slave who seemed to double as his major-domo. ‘It’s pretty important.’

‘He could’ve gone to the shop he owns, sir,’ he said. ‘You could try it, anyway. The one selling antiques and curios, in the street opposite the market square.’

‘Yeah, I know where it is,’ I said. ‘I’ll do that. Thanks.’

I was cutting through market square on the way to the shop when I felt a hand on my arm. I turned to find Tertius, Silius Nerva’s slave who’d taken me out to Mettius’s villa.

‘Yeah, pal, what can I do for you?’ I said.

He glanced over his shoulder before answering. Then he said quietly: ‘The master told me to keep an eye out for you, sir. I was to say you should go over to the brothel straight away.’

‘I was planning to do that anyway later,’ I said. ‘Any special reason for the hurry?’

He swallowed and lowered his voice still further: like I say, we were in the middle of the square, and as usual at that time of day you couldn’t get anywhere in town less private. ‘There, ah, seems to have been another suspicious death, sir. The owner, Opilia Andromeda.’

‘ Andromeda? ’ Oh, shit. I stared at him. ‘When the hell was this?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I don’t know any of the details. But the slave Carillus reported it to the master about an hour ago. He’s instructed that nothing be done until you were contacted.’

Gods alive! First Mettius dead, now his girlfriend. How many more bodies were we going to get before we were finished? Still, I should’ve seen this one coming: if my second theory about the meeting was right — that Mettius and Andromeda had met the killer together — it was a murder waiting to happen.

Fool! Mind you, it wasn’t altogether my fault. I’d tried to talk to her, after all, and she’d ducked out.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll go over there now. Same procedure as last time. Send to Castrimoenium for Clarus as soon as you can manage it, right?’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ll go myself straight away.’

‘Fine.’ Yeah, well, there was one plus, if you could call it that: being dead let Andromeda off the hook as a suspect pretty spectacularly. Like I said, though, I should’ve been expecting it after Mettius had been killed. If the two of them had been an item — and I knew now for certain from Vatinia that they were — then they must have had something cooking between them. Something, naturally, involving the murderer and prompting that meeting in the pine grove. And whatever it was, it’d done for them both.

I went round to the brothel. The door was locked this time, but when I knocked Carillus opened it for me. Barely after the first couple of raps, too: I wondered if the guy had been standing in the lobby right behind it, just waiting for me to arrive, maybe even for the whole time since he’d called in the death.

He looked old, older than he even had a right to look, and his face was grey as an unwashed rag. He was also, very obviously, still in shock. When I stepped past him he closed and locked the door again behind me.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Master Nerva gave strict instructions that no one be let in except you. And I’ve told the girls to stay in their rooms.’

‘That’s fine, pal,’ I said. ‘Now tell me what happened, OK? At your own pace, slowly and clearly.’

‘Yes, sir.’ He took a deep breath. ‘The mistress didn’t come down at her usual time. Normally I would just have waited until she did and had rung for me, but one of the local tradesmen arrived with a bill that had to be settled urgently, so I thought it was best to let her know at once. She wasn’t in her sitting room, so I called up the stairs and got no answer. I went up to the flat and … found her. She was … She …’ He stopped and stood shaking. ‘I was very fond of the mistress, sir, even though I’d only known her for a short time. She was a good person. She didn’t deserve to die like that.’

‘OK, Carillus,’ I said gently. ‘I’ll go up. You want to stay here?’

‘No, sir, I’ll come. You’ll have more questions for me, no doubt.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Lead the way, then.’

We went through the sitting room and up the internal stairs. The flat was a single room, sparsely furnished with a bed, a clothes chest and another book cubby packed with book-rolls. Andromeda was lying on the bed. She was wearing a sleeping tunic, and her head and the mattress beneath it were a mess of blood. Barring a cursory look, I didn’t touch her: that was Clarus’s department, and I was familiar enough now with the way he worked not to disturb things.

Or not to disturb the body, at least; there was still the question of the missing statuette. It hadn’t been in her sitting room downstairs when I’d looked, but there was just a chance that it was up here. I crossed over to the clothes chest and opened the lid. Nothing but clothes all the way down. There wasn’t anything that shouldn’t be there squirrelled away in the book cubby, either, or underneath the bed. Of course, the murderer could’ve seen and taken it, but still …

I went to the door that led to the outside staircase and lifted the latch. The door opened.

‘This wasn’t locked?’ I said.

Carillus was carefully not looking at the body. ‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘There’s no key. It went missing in Rutilia Tyche’s time, and the mistress didn’t bother to replace it. There was no need, really. We don’t have much crime in Bovillae.’

I almost smiled to myself. Yeah, right; barring three murders, an arson scam and a dodgy antiques business, at the very least. But I knew what the old guy meant.

‘She’d arranged for a locksmith to come round to fit a new lock and a set of bolts, though.’

‘Oh? When did she do that?’ I asked.

‘Yesterday, sir. I told you when you called that she’d gone out. The man was going to do it this afternoon.’

So he hadn’t been lying after all, except about not knowing where she’d gone; which might just — if he had pointed me in the right direction — have saved her life, because then we might’ve had our second talk that day after all. Not that I’d even hint at that to Carillus; he was upset enough already without adding guilt to the mix. Still, the fact that she’d been updating the flat’s security arrangements as a matter of urgency was significant: Andromeda had known she was a target, and she was frightened. Which almost certainly meant that, when she’d talked to me only a few hours previously, she’d known perfectly well who murdered Caesius — and more, that he’d just nailed her lover Mettius.