Lindsey Davis - Enemies at Home

‘You are going to tangle with the vigiles — then you’ll want to go after the robbers, don’t deny it, Albia. I checked progress with your client this morning and it’s obvious. Manlius Faustus is an idiot if he trusts you to obey orders.’

‘He’s not an idiot — but he is wrong, and so are you, to try and tie me down.’

Quintus tipped his head on one side. He had rather fine brown eyes which he deployed − perhaps unconsciously, though I thought not − to inveigle women who knew better to fall in with his wiles. Don’t ask me what wiles. I preferred not to know. ‘So what’s the story there?’ he asked.

‘Where?’

‘Devious Niece, you and the plebeian aedile?’

‘There is no story. Nosy Uncle, why don’t you trot into the apartment and inspect the scene of crime, while I nip out for an onion? There’s a slave called Myla who has been waiting all her life to be bewitched by you. Leave me alone and ask her some questions.’

‘Ooh, will she make wild relevations?’

‘You will doubtless get further with her than I did.’

‘She can wait,’ decided Quintus annoyingly. ‘I’ll plan my assault on the winsome Myla while I am escorting you.’

I gave in. To be honest I was glad. He must have come straight from the Curia, so was still togaed up. It never does any harm to take a senator, with his full purple banding, when you venture into the offices of armed men who despise women. Besides, despite his snooty rank and mild demeanour, my uncle kept in shape; he always made handy back-up.

He had a couple of bodyguards following him about discreetly too. Because of the case, I took more notice of them than usual. They were his usual lost lambs — ex-legionaries who had been invalided out of the army, one with a paralysed arm, one who hadn’t actually lost an eye but might as well have done, he was so short-sighted — and he really did have an ear torn off, probably not in battle. This was typical of Uncle Quintus. His career posting as a military tribune had left him feeling responsibility towards the Empire’s damaged soldiers. He had felt sorry for my late husband in the same way.

Would these two squaddies, with not a whole set of limbs between them, be good enough protection today? Quintus probably had innocent faith in them, but I would avoid anywhere we might be mugged.

I was not accompanied by Dromo. He had been asleep with his mouth wide open and I had tiptoed past him.

Good work — until I ran into my uncle.

As we set off walking, I admitted that ‘winsome’ Myla was a lazy, lactating lump on whom Uncle Quintus would not want to waste his skills.

I also admitted I was going to see Titianus. My uncle declared the Second Cohort were donkey dung (which I told him was normal for the vigiles), and corrupt (which we agreed we also expected), and even more undermanned than the other cohorts — which last point showed Quintus Camillus Justinus in his true light. He had carried out useful research before he turned up.

Of course he was good. My father trained him.

The station house of the Second Cohort had been built down the highway from the Esquiline Gate. It was most fragrantly situated between the large Pallantian Garden, created by a freedman of the Emperor Claudius, and the even more elaborate, statue-crammed, water-featured, gazeboed and porticoed Gardens of Lamia and Maiana, with the Gardens of Maecenas adjacent, containing a fancy auditorium where my father in a misguided moment once held a public poetry reading. This area was a topiary seller’s dream. Lopsided sea monsters and one-winged phoenixes, clipped in laurel and box, watched your every move. In June you couldn’t breathe for poplar fluff. The vigiles were beset by elegant recreational facilities — which I bet they never even noticed. More importantly for their work as firefighters, they had easy access to aqueducts.

On a good day, Titianus would have been off duty. I would have pressed his disloyal colleagues to give their opinion of his half-baked Aviola inquiry, and they might have dished dirt. It was not a good day. Instead of working at night, like any conscientious investigator who goes out on foot with the troops, this swine liked to take his ease on the day shift, playing with paperwork by himself. He was available in his snug.

I could see why the Second Cohort had made Titianus their inquiry officer. He would never meld in anywhere else. The average firefighter is built like a stone sarcophagus, with short wide legs and no neck: a wide-loom tunic man. They like ripping those tunics off in public, to amaze onlookers with their physique.

Sadly for him, Titianus had hair of an indiscriminate colour, pouchy eyes and a desolate expression, while his physique was far from fantastic. He did wear a tunic that was wider than it was long, but it hung off him in folds. It looked like the skin of an obese patient whose doctor has starved him into losing two hundred pounds, the week before he collapses and dies of malnutrition. (‘At least he was healthy when he passed away.’ ‘Well, thank you, doctor!’)

Unlike normal inquiry officers, we found Titianus sitting up straight at his desk. Evidently he had not been shown how to put up his boots on the table while he cleaned out his ear-wax. What was wrong with the Second Cohort’s training manual? Finding him not belching over a packet of cold bar snacks, Uncle Quintus looked disappointed. He is always hungry and was expecting to pinch nibbles.

After introductions, Quintus left me to it; he wandered back outside to the exercise yard, the hub of any vigiles barracks, where men on call were tidying equipment. I knew he would start asking questions about firefighting kit, then while he endeared himself to the troops by treating them as human, he would fish for any facts that Titianus might prefer to keep from us.

In the office, I started by asking the dolorous-eyed Titianus about the night of the robbery. There were no surprises. That in itself was no surprise.

‘Yes, it all fits!’ He probably thought my remark was a commendation. ‘One thing you can tell me, Titianus, is what the killers used to strangle the victims. Rope has been mentioned. Is it correct you took it away as evidence?’

This time Titianus squirmed unhappily. ‘There was a rope, left around the dead woman’s neck. That steward, Poly-wotsit, took it off her — act of respect to the dead. I didn’t collect it from the scene immediately as I was too busy, and later it had vanished. Thrown out when they tidied up? It wasn’t important.’

‘It might be. An aggressive lawyer may call this carelessness,’ I warned him frankly.

‘Bull’s balls. Let him. I don’t see it. What point is some nasty twine? We confiscate knives — to be honest, we find our own uses for those. But we haven’t enough space to store endless crates of rubbish, just because perps have used them as murder weapons. We’d be cluttered up with rusty pruning hooks and broken planks off building sites. We can’t do it.’

‘Not even in cases you haven’t solved yet, where these may turn out to be clues?’

‘Oh, face it, Flavia Albia — nobody’s ever going to solve this case!’

I was tempted to declare that I would solve it, but I was starting to agree with him. I made much of needing to file a report for the aedile: ‘He’s going to ask about the robbers, Titianus. What story can we give him there?’ Saying ‘we’ was deliberate. Even a vigiles inquiry officer who stayed in the office to play about with bureaucracy, or whatever Titianus played with, would avoid having his work checked by a magistrate.

‘I don’t reckon there were any robbers,’ Titianus claimed, his attitude now defensive. ‘It’s staring you in the face, woman: the slaves killed their masters, then they snaffled the silver and made up a story about the house being broken into, using that as cover.’