Ruth Downie - Caveat emptor

“So she says.”

“Dear me.” said Albanus. “I hope I haven’t offended her.”

The Quaestor’s office was closed. There was no response to Ruso’s knocking. His impatient rattling of the handle only brought out the clerk from two doors down, who told him Nico was ill. The doctor had given orders that he was not to be disturbed.

As they left the Great Hall by the street doors, Dias looked to right and left. “Where to now, sir?”

“The quaestor’s house. I need to check some final details for my report to the procurator.” He hoped the excuse did not sound as lame as it felt.

“The quaestor’s ill, sir.”

“I know.”

Dias said nothing as they tromped through a series of right angles from the forum to the narrow and quiet street where Nico lived. On arrival he looked disgruntled at being left to guard the dandelions sprouting in the gutter, but he had to agree that a sickly and mouse-sized quaestor was unlikely to present any danger. Inside, Ruso was in luck. The buxom landlady in charge of the building in which Nico rented rooms was more impressed by the arrival of an investigator than by the faint voice reminding her from somewhere above them that the doctor had said he was not allowed visitors.

“What’s the matter with him?” Ruso asked as he followed her up the creaking stairs of lodgings that were surprisingly modest for a man who controlled the town’s money.

“He’s come out in a terrible rash, sir. You can ask him.” The woman flung open a door and announced, “The man from Londinium to see you.”

Nico was huddled in a narrow bed in the gloom, enveloped in a blanket and an atmosphere that smelled of unwashed man, unemptied chamber pot, and linseed oil. At the sight of his visitor, he shrank away and looked as though he was hoping to slide off his pillows and scuttle away down a gap between the floorboards.

“I can’t talk to you,” he said. “I’m ill.”

Ruso waited until the woman had gone, then opened the door again to make sure she wasn’t listening on the stairs. Somewhere outside a dog erupted into frantic barking.

He said, “What’s this about a rash?”

Nico’s eyes widened.

“I used to work in an army hospital,” Ruso explained, clapping back the shutters to let in some light and reveal the source of the barking. A terrier was chained to a stake in the middle of an untidy yard. It was leaping up and rattling the chain, straining to escape toward a rubbish heap piled against a tumbledown fence. Beyond the fence was the stolid form of Gavo, evidently under orders to watch the back of the house no matter what the dog had to say about it. Ruso was satisfied that none of the conversation inside the room would be overheard.

Nico had pushed his bedding down to his waist. He lifted his pale linen tunic to reveal a bony chest that was indeed covered in an angry rash. A greasy brown substance had been plastered over it.

“Is it on your back as well?”

Nico leaned forward to demonstrate that it went across the top of his shoulders and around his waist, but the center of his back was normal.

Ruso gestured to him to replace the tunic. “Any back pain, headaches?”

“Terrible pain in my back and legs,” said Nico. “My head hurts and my tongue is hawble.” It was halfway out of his mouth before he finished the sentence.

“So it is,” agreed Ruso, cocking his head sideways to get a better view of the ugly white coating Nico was demonstrating.

“The doctor says I mustn’t be disturbed.” Nico waved one hand weakly toward a bottle on the shelf. “He’s given me a powerful new medicine to try, but it’s doing no good.”

Ruso took out the stopper, sniffed, and wished he hadn’t. “Very powerful,” he agreed.

“He’s read the signs. He said I mustn’t speak to anybody about the missing money.”

There was no point in asking which signs: It would be some conjunction of the stars, or an arrangement of freshly spilled animal guts, or whatever local equivalent was peddled to the gullible.

Ruso crouched to peer under the bed and reached for an old scrubbing brush that lay beyond the chamber pot. He ran his forefinger over the bristles, and then put it back and wiped his hand on his tunic. “How are you sleeping?”

“Terrible. I just lie awake for hours.”

“Well, you wouldn’t be the only one last night. What did you think of the thunderstorm?”

“Dreadful,” said Nico. “I hate thunderstorms.”

“Right then,” said Ruso, straightening up. “I wouldn’t worry too much. I’ve seen this before. It gets better by itself.”

“It does?”

“Usually when the patient stops scrubbing his chest with a stiff brush and putting chalk on his tongue. I was an army medic, Nico. I’ve seen some of the best malingering there is and yours doesn’t come close. There wasn’t a thunderstorm. Now sit up and tell me who attacked my wife last night.”

Nico positively jolted with shock. “Your wife? Attacked? Oh, this is terrible! Was she hurt?”

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“Who? I know nothing about it! What’s happening to us all?”

“I don’t know,” said Ruso. “Maybe I’ll work it out if you tell me why the hell you’re sending me anonymous death threats.”

“Me?” Nico drew up his knees under the blanket and wrapped his thin arms around them, but it did not disguise the trembling. “Death threats?”

Ruso gestured toward the stairs. “I’ll ask the landlady whether you went out of the house last night, shall I?”

“No! Please, I’m…” He stopped.

“You’re not ill,” said Ruso. “We’ve just established that.” He leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. “I’m willing to accept that it wasn’t you who attacked my wife. So are you planning to sneak out and murder one of us, or do you think somebody else is?”

“Oh, no! I would never hurt anybody.”

That much at least was credible.

Nico clamped one hand against his forehead in a gesture that would get him a job in the new theater if it were ever built. “You will think I am deranged.”

“Try me.”

“I was trying to warn you,” he said. “I have dreams. Terrible dreams, always the same. A man is being stabbed in the back, and I am supposed to save him but I can’t move. I never knew what it meant until you arrived. Then I realized. You are the man in the dream!”

“Rubbish,” said Ruso, hoping he was right. He had heard plenty of stories of premonitions in dreams. Some were true and others were nonsense, but he had never heard of one quite so specific.

“And now your wife has been attacked!” Nico shuddered. “I don’t believe in these things, either, but how would I feel if it came true?”

“Not as bad as I would,” said Ruso. “So in your dream, who’s doing the stabbing?”

“I don’t know. I never see his face.”

“Let me help you,” suggested Ruso. “There isn’t a dream, any more than there’s an illness. You and I both know there’s something illegal going on here, and whoever’s doing it is desperate to cover it up. Dias is involved in it, and probably another man too, and it’s something to do with forged denarii.”

Nico gave an anguished howl. As he was saying, “I don’t know anything! Help!” the landlady’s voice sounded up the stairs. “Are you all right in there, gents?”

Ruso grabbed the undersides of Nico’s bent knees through the blanket and jerked them upward, tipping him flat before clamping a hand over his mouth. “Shut up,” he hissed. Nico’s arms flailed helplessly as Ruso called down the stairs, “We’re fine, thank you.” He removed the hand. “Talk.”

Nico took a deep breath, as if he had been starved of air. “Go away. Please, go away before they come after you too. I can’t tell you anything.”