Ruth Downie - Caveat emptor

“He never gave us nothing to send, though.”

“So you don’t know who he was writing to?”

“No, sir.”

Ruso turned it toward the light and saw “ROOM XXVII” inked on the outside. He flipped the leaves open. A couple of lines of script trailed over the wax in a gentle curve, as if the letters were running downhill. The straggly squiggles seemed to include parts of an alphabet Ruso had never met before. He snapped the letter shut. He would look at it later. In the meantime he followed the owners back down to the kitchen, reflecting that if they had needed to smuggle the body up these stairs instead of down them, they would have been forced to leave it where it was, treat it with respect, and cause him a lot less trouble.

The thought of having to break the bad news to Camma took away any sense of satisfaction Ruso might have felt at finding the missing man. It seemed that after arriving in Londinium, Asper had made no attempt to deliver the money or to report its theft to the procurator. Perhaps Tilla was right: The man was himself a thief who had abandoned his family. Or perhaps he had been betrayed and murdered by a greedy brother. However he had ended up here, the sorry tale was unlikely to be of much comfort to his widow.

Asper was beyond help, but it might still be possible to trace the cash. “The money that he was carrying with him was marked,” he said, improvising. “It can all be identified. So if you have it, or you know what happened to it, I suggest you hand it over now, because if you try to spend it you’ll be in even deeper water than you are already.”

The man looked at his wife. “Two denarii, weren’t it?”

The wife’s nod was a little too hasty.

The man reached for the keys dangling from his belt. “I’ll fetch it.” As he headed off somewhere to find his takings, he called over his shoulder, “I don’t suppose there’ll be compensation?”

“No,” agreed Ruso, who had hoped to flush out considerably more than two denarii, an outrageous overcharge for a very shabby room. “I don’t suppose there will.”

When the husband had gone, the wife abandoned the small creatures on the spit, placed her reddened face alarmingly close to Ruso, and whispered, “Sir! Sir, please, I beg you-just take two denarii. Take whatever you want. Please.”

Ruso loosened her grip on his arm. “I’m not asking for a bribe,” he said. “All the procurator wants is the money that Asper had with him when he went missing.”

“But it’s not there, sir!” She dropped her voice and mouthed almost silently, “He didn’t have no money.”

“But-”

She nodded toward the door. “I told Grumpy that, just to shut him up. The man said he had a friend what would pay the bill, and he looked honest, and I felt sorry for him, and-”

She broke off as her husband came back into the room carrying a shallow wooden box. He placed it on the table and lifted the lid to reveal a series of compartments for different denominations of coin. “Two denarii, sir,” he reminded Ruso. “Taken in good faith by my wife, who has got me and her into all this trouble and caused you a whole lot of bother because she can’t bloody say no.”

Ruso was conscious of the wife’s eyes on him as he scooped up seven or eight small silver coins. He began to flip them over in his palm. He dropped three back into the box, picked one out, then flipped over a couple more before holding a second one up, squinting at it, and pretending to find what he was looking for. Then he tugged open his own purse, found enough coin to make up the value, and placed it in the correct compartments of the box before closing the lid.

“Oh, thank you, sir!” gasped the wife.

“How do you tell?” asked the innkeeper, looking as though he had just seen some sort of magic trick and was not sure he believed it.

“It’s confidential,” Ruso told him.

“So what happens now?”

“I’ll examine the body and report to the office,” said Ruso. “They’ll have to decide whether they believe your story. Whatever happens, you’ve lied repeatedly and wasted official time. Do you two have the faintest idea what the penalty is for getting in the way of a procurator’s inquiry?”

A tear slid down the woman’s cheek. The man was twisting a fistful of tunic into a knot as he said, “No, sir.”

“I didn’t think so,” said Ruso, who had no idea either. “But if you’re still lying, it’ll be even worse. So is there anything else you want to tell me before it’s too late?”

In the silence that followed, Ruso reflected that he was sounding like his father. “The name of the boatman would be a good start.”

Finally the woman said, “It was Tetricus, sir.”

The innkeeper muttered something under his breath that sounded very much like “Stupid cow.”

“Tetricus,” repeated Ruso, guessing Tetricus would not be bringing them any more business and wondering if he was one of the boatmen who had denied all knowledge of Asper and his brother yesterday. “Where can I find him?”

The woman glanced at her husband, then said, “He’ll be out on the river, sir. But after dark he lodges somewhere behind the grain warehouse on the corner.” The look the innkeeper gave her suggested she would be sorry for this later.

“Good,” said Ruso, adding, “At least one of you has some sense,” although he doubted that his approval would offer her any protection once the door had closed behind him. “You’ll be hearing from us,” he continued. “In the meantime, get that room scrubbed clean, wash the bedding, and air the mattress. It’s a disgrace. If the accommodation inspectors see that, they’ll close you down.”

The man looked up. “What accommodation inspectors?”

“The ones who are about to go around checking lodgings ready for the visit of the Imperial household,” invented Ruso. “Who, frankly, wouldn’t put their lowliest turd collector in a room like that.”

According to the unemployed boatmen whose board game Ruso interrupted, Tetricus had been seen heading upriver just after dawn. Nobody knew where he was going, or indeed whether he had subsequently returned, rowed past, and traveled in the opposite direction. Despite the promise of the cheapest rates on the river, Ruso rejected the offers of a boat trip on which they might be lucky enough to spot him. He left a message instead. He ought to break the news to Camma. And although she was unlikely to care, he would have to ask her if she could read the letter, or if she had ever heard of Room Twenty-seven.

Mulling over his morning’s experiences as he strode back up the sunlit street, he decided that being an official investigator was much easier than being a doctor. It was the sort of job where you could impress people without knowing very much about anything at all. On the other hand, it seemed to consist largely of making other people miserable. Tilla was right about one thing: The sooner it was over, the better.

Ruso had barely lifted his hand to knock on Valens’s door when it was wrenched open. Glimpsing a pile of luggage in the hallway behind his wife, he did not need to be told that she and the newly widowed Iceni woman had been waiting here for hours with everything packed, that all the transport to Verulamium had gone without them, and that if he wanted any lunch he was too late.

She told him anyway.

“I’m sorry, I got held up.” He was ashamed to hear himself adding with guile worthy of Valens, “Didn’t you get a message?”

“No.” She glanced up the stairs and lowered her voice. “Perhaps the dead man you sent forgot to tell me.”

Valens’s consulting rooms were separated from the main hallway by a narrow lobby that housed mops and brooms and smelled of vinegar and rising damp. He drew her into the dark space before asking, “How’s Camma?”