Ruth Downie - Caveat emptor

“Are you sure he was alone?” asked Ruso. “There was another man missing as well.”

“Him with half an ear? I’d have remembered.”

“Did he say anything else? Any suggestion of why he was in the boat, or where he’d come from, or who the friend was?”

“Like I said, he wasn’t looking too well. Said his head was hurting.”

“He had a fractured skull.”

“Really?” The whites of the boatman’s eyes showed up in the dim light. “He didn’t say. He didn’t have nothing with him, either.”

“What makes you say that?”

“ ’Cause you lot wouldn’t be bothering with him unless he had something worth taking.”

“Some money was stolen,” Ruso conceded.

“Not by me it weren’t. Wait a minute: There’s still a bit of light. I’ll open the door. Then you can have a good look at everything a man has to show for twenty-four years in the navy.”

“The money I’m looking for should have been delivered to the tax office,” said Ruso. “It’s marked. So if you know anything about it, you’d be wise to say so before we find it.”

“Not a thing, boss,” announced the man, scraping the bar up out of its socket. “Not a thing. Go on, take the candle and search if you don’t believe me.”

Ruso, who did believe him, stepped forward to grope under the bed. He stifled the urge to apologize for the intrusion. Real investigators, he was certain, neither apologized nor explained.

“You lot are all the same.” The man dragged the door open and Ruso caught sight of the tall apprentice ducking back out of sight outside.

“You want to know if I’m honest?” demanded the boatman. “I could’ve sold that boat, but I didn’t. I went and put word out that I found it. You know why? I don’t want some poor sod out of work just ’cause Headache Man helped himself to it.”

“You don’t think it was Asper’s boat?”

“Course it wasn’t. He’d have had the oars, wouldn’t he?”

Ruso held the candle up. Long shadows from the rafters shifted around sooty cobwebs dangling from the thatch. He walked back and forth across the floor, kicking the rushes aside. There was no sign of disturbance in the packed mud beneath. Then he crouched in the doorway and prodded the soil in and around the pot that held the straggly bush. “There’s nothing here,” he agreed.

The boatman cleared his throat. “Have I done enough for the reward, then?”

“Any idea where he might have got the boat?”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “I’m giving you a lot of help here, boss. I only picked him up to do him a favor. I never got paid for it and now it’s causing me all this bother.”

Ruso reached for his purse and the man shut the door again. The candlelit smile revealed a set of black teeth. They disappeared when he realized the large volume of coins he was being given only added up to three denarii.

“I was told forty.”

“Never believe rumors,” said Ruso, who had not mentioned a figure. The light glinted on the edges of two silver coins as he placed them on the table. “My employer would very much like to know where the boat came from.”

The man sucked in air through the black teeth. “You wouldn’t believe how many miles of river join up to here. There’s whole towns. That’s before you count all the farms with land fronting the water.”

Ruso placed his forefinger on one of the denarii and slid it back toward his purse. It was less than an inch from the edge of the table when Tetricus said, “I did hear a rumor.”

The coin came to a halt.

“It might be nothing. People are always losing boats. And it don’t make much sense. I wouldn’t waste your time with it, only I heard he come from Verulamium and so does the rumor.”

“Just tell me,” said Ruso, to whom little of this Asper business was making sense at the moment.

“Farmer by the name of Lund, lives a couple of miles downstream from the town. Going round telling people that a river monster stole his boat.”

“Could Asper have traveled by boat from there to where you found him?”

Tetricus shrugged. “I said it didn’t make sense. He’d have been a lot quicker by road.”

“But it could be done?”

The man frowned, considered it, and agreed that the craft was light enough for the trip to be possible. Ruso slid the money across the table toward him. Tetricus gathered it up and got to his feet. “That’s it, then, is it?”

“That’s it,” Ruso agreed.

Tetricus grinned. “Glad to be of service, boss.”

Back in the street, the two apprentices were standing where Ruso had left them as if they had never moved. The impression of innocence was spoiled by a female giggle from a doorway and a call of, “Another time, eh, lads?”

It was difficult to tell in the poor light, but Ruso was fairly sure the short apprentice was blushing. “Wipe that silly grin off your face!” he snapped at the tall one, and was alarmed to find himself again sounding like his father.

When Ruso finally returned the apprentices to the safety of Valens’s house, he could hear the ominous strains of Tilla singing the sort of song she sang to relieve the boredom of cooking.

He found her disemboweling a plucked fowl by lamplight while the baby lay in a wicker crib in the shadows under the kitchen table. A cauldron was bubbling over the coals and the mixture of steam and chopped onion assaulted his eyes and his lungs. No wonder the kitchen boy had taken himself off to tidy up the dead flowers and sweep the hall.

“Your medicine worked,” said Tilla, wiping the back of her hand across her forehead in a vain attempt to push a damp curl out of her eyes. “Camma went to sleep.”

He reached across the table and tucked the hair out of the way. “It’s late to be starting dinner. We could get something brought in.”

“I will boil it very fast,” she promised. “So. Have you found out what you wanted to know?”

“I’m not sure.” He explained about the boatman.

The bird’s leg joint made a sucking noise as Tilla disarticulated it. She sliced it away with a couple of deft strokes. “Camma does not know why he was on the river,” she said, holding the leg between finger and thumb to examine both sides before dropping it into a bowl. “How near is it to the road?”

“Miles away. Apparently they diverge just out of Verulamium.”

Tilla pondered this as the second leg hit the side of the bowl and slithered down to join its mate.

“Did you ask about the letter?”

“She does not know, but two weeks ago she took some of his letters to the stables for the southbound carriage to pick up, and she thinks one of them had the number of that room written on the outside.”

The southbound carriage would have been heading here. “She can’t remember any more of the address?”

“Numbers are easy. Words are hard to read.” Tilla, who could not read herself, sliced something away from the bird’s tail end and tossed it into the waste bucket in the corner.

It occurred to Ruso that his wife seemed to have a particular talent for anything involving a knife. She would probably have made a far better surgeon than she was a cook.

“It wasn’t a planned escape,” he mused. “If it had been, he wouldn’t have needed to steal the boat. It’s looking more and more as if they both took the money and then the brother murdered him for it.”

Tilla sniffed, either from disdain or from onion: It was hard to tell. “She says Caratius is lying.”

“We’ve been round this already. They looked to me like old enemies.”

“She says he must be lying because Asper was not on the way to Londinium, he was only going to visit a neighbor just outside town. And the neighbor was Caratius.”