Steven Saylor - Arms of Nemesis

'I wouldn't borrow that particular cloak if I were you, Eco. I'm not sure how a man like Crassus would react to people of our ilk handling his personal things.'

Eco only shrugged and walked slowly around the room, gazing at the multitude of scrolls. Most of them were neatly rolled and inserted into long jackets of cloth or leather and identified by little tags. It appeared that the more literary works intended for pleasure or instruction — philosophical treatises, quaint Greek novels, plays, histories — had been given red or green tags, and were rather haphazardly catalogued, heaped atop one another in tall, narrow shelves. Documents relating to business transactions were more fastidiously arranged in individual pigeonholes and given blue or yellow tags. All in all, there were hundreds of scrolls, filling two walls from floor to ceiling.

Eco let out a low whistle. 'Yes, quite impressive,' I agreed. 'I don't think I've ever seen so many scrolls in one place, not even in Cicero's house. But for now I'd rather you directed your eyes downward, to the floor. If ever a carpet was designed to hide a bloodstain it must be this one, all dark red and black. Still, if Lucius bled on the floor and the assassin used only a cloak to wipe it up, there should be some sign of the stain.'

Eco joined me in peering down at the geometric pattern. The morning light grew stronger moment by moment, but the longer we studied it the more baffling the dark pattern seemed to become. Together we crossed the carpet step by step. Eco eventually dropped to his hands and knees like a hound, but to no avail. If there had ever been a drop of blood on the carpet, some god must have turned it to dust and blown it away.

The tile floor, where it showed beyond the carpet's edge, was no more revealing. I lifted the edge of the carpet and folded it back, thinking it might have been moved to cover a bit of bloodstain, but I found nothing.

'Perhaps Lucius wasn't killed in this room, after all.' I sighed. 'He must have bled somewhere, and there's nowhere to bleed except on the floor. Unless…' I stepped towards the table. 'Unless he was standing here, where he naturally would be standing in his library, in front of the table. The blow was to the front of his head, not the back, so he must have been facing his assailant. And the blow was on the right, not the left, so he must have been facing north, with his left side toward the table and his right side exposed. To strike the right temple head-on, the assailant must have used his left hand; that could be very important, Eco — anyone who picked up a heavy statue to use as a bludgeon would use the arm he favoured. We assume the killer was left-handed, then. Lucius would have been knocked sidelong onto the table…'

Eco obligingly pitched himself onto the table amid the clutter of documents Crassus had been studying the night before. He fell face-down with one arm beneath him and the other outstretched.

'In which case the blood might well have been spattered above the table, onto the wall — where it might as easily have been wiped away. I see no blood there now. Unless it spattered even higher…' I climbed onto my knees on the table. Eco pushed himself up to join me in studying the painting of Gelina. 'Encaustic on canvas, set in a frame of black wood with mother-of-pearl inlay — easy to wipe clean — and encased in the wall. Had any blood landed on the painting itself, I doubt the murderer would have dared to scrub the wax too vigorously for fear of damaging it, if indeed he saw the blood among all these pigments. Amazing, isn't it, how many colours there are in a painting when you see it this close? At this distance Iaia's signature is certainly large enough, done in red, but more likely cinnabar than blood. The folds of Gelina's stola are a mottled red and black; no doubt she chose these carpets to match her gown in the painting. Red here, black there, and — Eco, do you see it?'

Eco anxiously nodded. Dribbled across a patch of green background, where no painter would have been so careless as to spill it, was a spray of red-black drops the colour of dried blood. Eco peered closer and then began pointing out more drops — on the background, on the stola, everywhere across the bottom of the painting, even a smear across the first letter of Iaia's signature. The more we looked, the more we saw. In the growing morning light the drops seemed to blossom before our eyes, as if the painting itself wept blood. Eco made a face, and I grimaced in agreement: What a grisly blow must have been struck across the head of Lucius Licinius to have scattered so much gore. I drew back from the painting, repulsed.

'Ironic,' I whispered, 'that Lucius should have polluted with his own blood the painting of the wife he married for love, and ended here, a corpse, prostrate before her image. A jealous lover, Eco? Did someone intentionally murder him here, in front of the painting? It must have made quite a tableau, the dead husband crumpled lifeless before the serene image of his wife. But if someone intended it that way, then why was the body moved, and the spectre of Spartacus invoked?'

I stepped off the table, followed by Eco. 'There must have been blood on the table, easily wiped clean. Which means there must have been no documents lying here, as there are now, or else they would have been bloodied as well, and impossible to clean; blood will wipe off lacquered wood, but not parchment or papyrus. I wonder, though… here, help me pull the table from the wall.'

It was easier said than done. The table was heavy, too heavy perhaps for one man alone to lift it. Even with one of us at either end the job was awkward; we knocked over the chair, bunched the carpet and caused a loud screech as one table leg scraped across the tiled floor. Our reward was blood: on both the wall and the back edge of the table, trapped where no cloth could have reached it, there were patches of a gummy, red-brown residue. Lucius's blood had run across the table and pooled in the narrow space between table and wall, leaving its trace on both.

Eco wrinkled his nose. 'More proof that Lucius was murdered here, if we needed it,' I said. 'But what does that tell us? It makes no sense that the missing slaves would have wiped up the blood, especially if they were proud of the crime; still, it will take stronger proof than that to shake Crassus from his intention. Here, Eco, help me replace the table as it was. I hear footsteps in the hall.'

Just as I was picking up the chair and Eco was straightening the carpet, an inquiring face peered around the corner.

'Meto! Just the one I wanted to see. Step inside, and shut the door behind you.'

He did as I ordered, but not without hesitating. 'Are you sure we should be in this room?' he whispered.

'Meto, your mistress made it clear that I should have access to any part of the house, did she not?'

'I suppose. But no one was ever allowed in this room without the master's permission.'

'No one? Not even the scrub maids?'

'Only when the master would let them in, and even then he usually wanted himself or Zeno to be in the room.'

'But there's nothing here for a slave to pilfer — no small coins, no jewellery or trinkets.'

'Even so — once I snuck in, just because I wanted to have a closer look at the horse-'

'Horse? Ah, the centaur statue.'

'Yes, and the master himself walked in on me. He was angry in an instant, and the master wasn't normally an angry man. But his face turned all red and he shouted at me till I thought I would die from the pounding in my chest.' Meto's eyes opened wide at the memory. He puffed out his cheeks and shook his head, like a man trying to recover from a terrible dream. 'He called in Alexandros and ordered him to give me a beating, right here. Normally it would have been Clito, who also works in the stables and likes to give beatings, but I was lucky because Clito was working in Puteoli that day. I had to bend over and touch the floor while Alex gave me ten blows with a cane. He only did it because the master made him. He could have hit me a lot harder, I'm sure, but it still made me cry.'