Ruth Downie - Caveat emptor

He was not going to ask. Instead he rolled over and grabbed her. Breakfast could wait.

An hour later, the morning traffic came to a halt in the street as the occupants of Valens’s house stood to watch a shrouded body being loaded onto the floor of a carriage. Camma was pale and tight lipped, her grief marked only by the damp patches on the shawl wrapped around her fatherless baby.

Ruso, who had paid the driver well with Firmus’s money, accompanied the carriage to the edge of town. When it reached the gates to the North road he bade the women good-bye and reminded the driver of his duty to deliver them to their door. The carriage passed under the arch and out toward the cemetery under an overcast sky, picking up speed as the driver urged the horses into a trot. Ruso lifted one hand in a last farewell, but if there was any response, it was hidden by an oxcart coming toward him.

They were gone.

Yesterday Ruso had been an object of interest to the procurator’s staff, providing relief from the daily routine. Today he had sunk to being just another nuisance, making annoying requests and placing demands upon their time. They had indeed suffered a visit from Tetricus the boatman yesterday afternoon, and the expenditure clerk seized his chance to point out that if Ruso planned to go around the town announcing rewards, it would help if he warned the office first.

“Sorry,” said Ruso, and meant it.

The resigned tone of, “Never mind, sir,” suggested that the staff was used to being uninformed and underappreciated. Ruso’s attempts to improve things did not seem to help. They did not look at all pleased to be told that others might be arriving to report sightings of the missing Julius Bericus.

“I’ll clear all this with Firmus,” said Ruso, correctly guessing that this would not impress them either.

“He’s in a meeting with the procurator, sir.”

“Any idea how long he’ll be?”

The expenditure clerk’s, “No, sir,” somehow also conveyed the information that since nobody in authority ever told the office anything, only a fool would have asked such a stupid question.

“You don’t happen to know where the Catuvellauni magistrate’s staying, do you?”

“That would be the one who turned up yesterday, sir?”

“Caratius. Yes.”

“I believe he lodges with a friend opposite the west gate of the Forum when he’s in town, sir.”

“Excellent!” said Ruso, pleasantly surprised. “Thank you.”

He was almost out of the door when the man added, “But he’s not there now, sir.”

Apparently the magistrate had been summoned to meet the procurator first thing in the morning, and left for Verulamium immediately afterward.

Ruso left Firmus a note explaining that he needed to question Caratius again. He would have tried to catch him on the road, but he had promised to have that incomprehensible letter looked at, and in all the confusion, he had forgotten to retrieve it from the apprentices this morning.

“Would you care to tell us when you’ll be back, sir?”

Ruso looked the clerk in the eye. “Later,” he said, then relented. He had suffered from enough unreliable colleagues to know how aggravating it was to work with someone who might or might not turn up at any moment. “I’ll drop by for messages when I get here,” he promised.

The smirk on the face of the expenditure clerk suggested his concession had been seen as a sign of weakness.

He headed back to Valens’s house to collect the letter, glancing around occasionally to see who else was in the street. The events of last night had left him uneasy. While everyone else had been reassuring themselves that no harm had been done, nothing had been stolen, and the only damage was a serious fright, Ruso had been mulling over the identity and the intentions of the intruder. Pausing to lean on the rail of the footbridge while an elderly man and a dog ushered four sheep across the stream, he wondered if he should have taken the tall apprentice’s sighting of a hooded man more seriously. What if they really had been followed? Whoever it was must know where they lived-although why anyone should care was a mystery. Besides, any sensible burglar would try to disguise himself. A hood was the easiest way to do it.

There was no answer to Ruso’s knock at Valens’s street door. After last night’s events he was not surprised to find it firmly locked. Three patients were lined up on the bench outside the surgery entrance. That was closed too.

He walked along the side of the building and turned into the back lane. From here he could see into the garden, but his plans to vault over the wall were thwarted by a group of figures outside the kitchen window. The figure in the middle with the toga draped untidily over his head was Valens. He was lifting a cup into the air and speaking to it while the apprentices and the kitchen boy looked on, wide eyed. Then he tipped the cup and a pale stream of wine cascaded down into the scrubby undergrowth. Evidently he had taken the break-in seriously enough to seek divine protection.

Distracted by the sight of this unusually diligent appeal to the household gods, Ruso was startled to hear a heavy sigh beside him. A pair of muscular arms leaned on the wall. They were attached to solid shoulders encased in plate armor. Above the armor a thick neck led to a square jaw, a broken nose, and an army haircut.

Valens finished his devotions and looked up. “Can I help, sir?”

“I’m a friend of the landlord,” said the centurion. “Saw the address on the night watch report. Any damage?”

Valens unwrapped his toga and rolled it into an untidy bundle as he made his way through the weeds to the garden wall. “Just a downstairs window forced. Ruso there chased him off before he could take anything.”

The gaze was aimed at Ruso while the broken nose veered slightly off to the left. “Don’t suppose you got a description?”

“It was dark,” Ruso said. “I tried to stop him getting past me, but I couldn’t get hold of him. He was covered in something slippery, he was wearing a hood, and he’d left the door open to make a quick escape.”

“Greased himself to avoid capture,” said the centurion, as if it was something Ruso should have expected. He glanced at the apprentices and the kitchen boy. “Any of you lot see anything?”

The taller lad looked delighted to be asked. “I’m almost sure there was a man with a hood following us down behind the wharf last night, sir.”

“I meant here.”

“No, sir. We were asleep till we heard all the crashing around and the ladies calling out, sir.”

The man grunted. “I’ll submit a report.” He gestured toward the window, said, “Get some bars put on it,” and walked away.

While Valens was dealing with his patients, the short apprentice emerged from the surgery with a small box of broken pottery. Part of the disturbance Ruso had heard last night was a jar of bear grease smashing on the tiled floor.

“He took the hall lamp in there, sir,” the lad observed. “He must have been clever not to wake anybody. But he wasn’t much of a burglar. Doctor Valens’s equipment was all laid out in there, but nothing’s been taken.”

“Good,” said Ruso, his unease growing. Quality medical instruments were precision made, portable, and costly, and a thief as intelligent as this one seemed to be should have stolen them. He had been prowling around the house for longer than Ruso cared to remember. What had he been doing?

It was a mystery he did not have time to ponder.

“That letter I gave you,’ he said. ‘Did you have any luck deciphering it?”

They had not, but both apprentices had spent a couple of hours trying. Oblivious to how happy this must have made Valens, the short apprentice went back into the surgery to fetch the wax tablet on which it was written.