Lindsey Davis - The Accusers

'Asking for me? Who was that?'

'He didn't say.'

'So what did you say?'

'I said we hadn't seen you up here for months.'

Nobody normal who wanted me would look for me on the Arx. I had no idea what this could mean, so I did not let it trouble me.

Being in the neighbourhood, I then explored an angle I had not listed in my notes. I walked down to the Forum and gave myself another unpleasant hour of officialdom. I wanted to know more about why Metellus and his son had been exposed in the corruption case. Where better to start, than the aediles' office?

Wrong, Falco. There was a new young brat in charge of Rome's road contracts. A friendly one would have thought the sins of his predecessor were good for a gossip, but this gilt-edged dong fell back on 'issue of national security' and maintained I was not entitled to enquire into such matters. I mentioned working as an agent for Vespasian; he still blocked me. He did not know what happened under Metellus Negrinus. He could not discuss previous errors. He was far too busy with muddy streets, crooked market weights, and endless complaints about rats rioting all night by the Altar of Peace. I could go and ram myself head-first into a narrow drain.

I should have known. The corruption case had made the aediles' scams too obvious. Audits had been instituted. Procedures had been tightened. This new young fellow might have made a killing, but for the Metellus trial. How was he now to assemble enough cash to finance lavish public Games in order to obtain the votes to move up his career ladder to the next flashy post?

He clearly wished he had jurisdiction over temple maintenance, where the bribes were notorious.

Being thwarted can damage an enquiry; I get hooked on beating the system. But it makes me more determined. So never mind the fine detail of poison and timescales which I was supposed to investigate today. I decided to find Verontius. Verontius was appalling, but he would talk to me. I knew how to make sure of it.

Normally I would walk barefoot across a mile of burning bitumen before I would encounter Verontius. He was a shifty, shambling worker in the semi-public world of road contracts. He could bend figures better than a conjurer stuffing doves up his fundament. I would be lucky if I could get away from him without a burst blood vessel and having to lend him my carpentry plane (if I ever let him get his hands on it, I would never see it again). He stank of armpits and feet. He despised me. I loathed him. Except in this emergency, we would, avoid each other from one Saturnalia to the next – though at Saturnalia we were always compelled to meet. Unluckily for me, he had been married to my lumpish sister Allia for the past twenty years, so we were bonded inescapably: Verontius and I were family.

Allia was out, thank the gods. A pitiful slave with scurvy let me in. I had to wade past pallid children to reach the back room where Verontius hunched like a toad down a well. He had a tablet of official looking tables, but was doodling at speed on a separate piece of old fish wrapper. (He had a secret second job as a squid-negotiator.) He would scribble like fury, work out a long sum, then carefully insert a single figure in the tender table with a better pen and new ink. Everything about his rapid calculations suggested he was up to no good. When he was not fiddling new contract applications, Verontius worked long hours supervising the bent contracts he had already won. I won't say he and Allia lived in squalor. We all knew that they had money. It was squirrelled away somewhere. Hoarded meanly, never spent. They would both die early, worn-out victims of a hard life they need not have had.

'Marcus!' He was colourless, bald, squinty and half deaf. He always had been, even way back. Such a catch for Allia! He had long ago learned to avoid looking guilty, but I watched the doodles being smoothly shunted into a fruit bowl while the tender was speedily rolled up under his stool. Even before he knew what I had come for, Verontius was clearing a sanitised space for his nosy in-law.

Once he knew that I wanted him to finger someone else, he was happy. 'Metellus Negrinus? Lovely boy, smashing little aedile – oh we did all like him!'

'Because he was on the take? Don't go coy on me. I don't want a dangerous commitment from you – I just need to understand how it worked. You knew about the corruption, I imagine?'

Verontius winked. 'Oh no!'

'Liar.'

'I have to live, Marcus. But I'm a small player.'

'You never gave evidence at the father's trial?'

'Hardly ever encountered the father. He dealt with the mighty consortiums. For the trial, I had too little to tell about that. But I was approached!' He was proud to have been considered. 'Approached by whom?'

'One of your lot.'

'Mine?'

'An informer came scouting, just before the trial.'

'But you chose to keep quiet to protect yourself'

'To protect a way of life, Marcus! Listen, road construction and maintenance is a specialist business. We operate in traditional ways, ways that go back centuries.'

'That old apology for cheating practices! What informer was it?'

'Don't remember.'

'Don't try too hard, you might wear out your brain -'

'Said he was called Procreus.'

'Never heard of him. What would you have told him, if he had bribed you enough?'

'Nothing.'

'Really?' I knew enough about Verontius to obtain a second version. 'Ever see that slave girl with the intriguing entablature you used to be so friendly with? What a pretty caryatid. Very architectural!'

He shuddered. She was somehow connected to his squid-peddling – that moonlight work Allia never seemed to notice, despite the smell. So my threat was about the secret money he earned, as well as his fishy playmate. Verontius still fooled around with the girl, and he knew I knew. 'O griddled goat's goolies, Marcus my son! I'm at home here -'

'So you are, Verontius old boy! Let's get the men's talk over before Allia comes back, shall we?'

It was not often I had the beautiful pleasure of extortion from a relative. Life was good for an hour. Allia came home to find Verontius a crumpled ghost of himself By then he had confided this: the road contractors' guild always carried out background checks on new officials. Prior to his arrival in post, Negrinus had been a worry to them. He had come from his earlier position, as quaestor, with a reputation for resisting sweeteners. The road contractors were expecting this but straight away it became apparent that the father was on hand, not just open to persuasion, but insisting on it.

'Money?'

'Oh grow up, Marcus! What else? You know, there was a funny atmosphere. At first we thought,' Verontius confided, 'they had had a bust-up.'

'It looks as if the father turned against the son. Negrinus has been left out of the will -'

'Not the impression we got. They were never at odds with each other. The father gave the orders; the son followed through – but there were no fights. Something had shaken them; they were like men who had just walked away from an earthquake. The shock left them operating very much as a team, a team in frantic need of cash.'

'Failed investment? Disaster at a property? You don't know what?'

'Enquiries failed to dig it out.'

'Your guild uses the wrong people!' I grinned, but stopped it quickly. The contractors' guild members are worse than virulent headlice. I didn't want their trade. 'So Negrinus came into his aedile post at just the right moment, and they wrung it dry?'

'Correct.'

'Any idea why Silius Italicus picked on them for it?'

Verontius shrugged. 'He must have been desperate for cash too.' My brother-in-law gave me a sickly leer. 'But then he's an informer, so that figures!'

Luckily for him, that was the moment we heard my sister Allia struggling to work her latch-lifter. I let her into her house; she and I glared at one another in our customary fashion; I left.