Lindsey Davis - Three Hands in The Fountain

'Stop kicking my door, Gaius.'

'I wasn't.'

'I'm not deaf, and those new footprints are your size.' 'Hello, Uncle Marcus.'

'Hello, Gaius,' I answered patiently. Helena had come out behind me; she reckoned Gaius needed sympathetic conversation and cosseting instead of the belt round the ear which the rest of my family regarded as traditional.

'I've brought you something.'

'Will I like it?' I could guess.

'Of course! It's a smashing present -' Gaius possessed a developed sense of humour. 'Well, it's another disgusting thing you want for your enquiry. A friend of mine found it in a drain in the street.'

'Do you often play in the drains?' asked Helena anxiously. 'Oh no,' he lied, alert to her reforming mood.

He fumbled in one of his pouches and brought out the gift. It was small, about the size of a draughts token. He showed me, then quickly whipped it out of sight. 'How much will you pay?' I should have known the rascal would have heard about the reward Petro had advertised. This sharp little operator had probably prevailed upon half the urchins in Rome to scour unsavoury spots for treasures that I could be bribed to buy.

'Who told you I wanted any more foul finds, Gaius?'

'Everyone's talking about what you and Petro are collecting. Father's at home again,' he said, so I knew who was sounding off most wildly.

'That's nice.' I disapproved of telling a thirteen-year-old boy I thought his father was an unreliable pervert. Gaius was clever enough to work it out for himself.

'Father says he's always fishing pieces of corpses out of the river -'

'Lollius always has to cap everyone else's stories. Has he been telling you wild tales about dismembered bodies?'

'He knows all about them! Have you still got that hand? Can I see it?'

'No, and no.'

'This is the most exciting case you've had, Uncle Marcus,' Gaius informed me seriously. 'If you have to go down the sewers to look for more bits, can I come and hold your lantern?'

'I'm not going down any sewers, Gaius. The pieces that have been found were in the aqueducts; you ought to know the difference. Anyway, it's all been taken care of now. An official is investigating the matter for the Curator of the Aqueducts, and Petronius and I are going back to our ordinary work.'

'Will the water board pay us for bones and stuff?'

'No, they'll arrest you for causing a riot. The Curator wants to keep this quiet. Anyway, what you've found may be nothing.'

'Oh yes it is,' Gaius corrected me hotly. 'It's somebody's big toe!'

At my shoulder Helena shuddered. Keen to impress her, the wretch brought out the knob of dark matter again, then once more demanded how much I would pay for it. I looked at it. 'Come off it, Gaius. Stop annoying me by trying to palm me off with an old dog's bone.'

Gaius scrutinised the item himself, then sadly agreed he was trying it on. 'I'll still hold the lamp for you if you go down the sewers.'

'The aqueducts, I told you. Anyway, I'd rather you held the baby so I don't get told off for abandoning her.'

'Gaius hasn't even seen Julia yet,' suggested Helena. My nephew had bunked off from our introduction party. He hated family gatherings: a lad with hidden sense.

Rather to my surprise he asked for a viewing now. Helena took him indoors and even lifted the baby out of the cradle so he could hold her. After one appalled glance he accepted the sleeping bundle (for some reason Gaius had always been fairly polite to Helena), and then we watched the famous tough being overcome by our tiny tot until he was positively eulogising her miniature fingers and toes. We tried not to show our distaste for this sentimentality.

'I thought you had little brothers and sisters of your own,' said Helena.

'Oh, I don't have anything to do with them!' returned Gaius scornfully. He looked thoughtful. 'If I did look after her, would there be a fee?'

'Of course,' said Helena at once.

'If you did it properly,' I added weakly. I would sooner leave Gaius in charge of a cage of rats, but the situation was desperate. Besides, I never thought he would want to do it.

'How much?' He was a true member of the Didii.

I named a price, Gaius made me double it, then he handed Julia very carefully back to Helena and decided to go home.

Helena called him back to be given a cinnamon pastry (to my annoyance, since I had already spotted it on the table and had been looking forward to devouring it myself). Then she kissed his cheek formally; Gaius screwed up his face, but failed to avoid the salute.

'Jupiter! I hope he's clean. I haven't dragged him to the baths since we went to Spain.'

We watched him go. I still held his little treasure from the drains. I was pleased with myself for rebuffing his attempt at bribery, though I had mixed feelings all the same.

'Why's that?' asked Helena dubiously, already suspecting the worst.

'Mainly because I rather think it really is a human toe.'

Helena touched my cheek gently, with the same air of taming a wild creature that she had shown when kissing Gaius. 'Well there you are,' she murmured. 'Anacrites can do what he likes – but you're obviously still taking an interest!'

Lenia let Petro and me put up a notice on the laundry advising that all samples of body parts from the waterways were now required By Order to be handed in to Anacrites. That helped.

We had become so notorious that even our flow of regular clients improved. Mostly they brought in work we could do with our eyes closed. There were the usual barristers wanting witness statements from people who lived out of Rome. I sent Petro to do those. It was a good way to take his mind off missing his children – and to make sure he could not disgrace himself again by visiting Balbina Milvia. Besides, he had not yet realised that the reason the barristers wanted to employ us for this work was that it was tedious as all Hades riding a mule to Lavinium and back just to hear some crone describe how her old brother had lost his temper with a wheelwright and bopped him on the nob with half an amphora (bearing in mind that the wheelwright would probably get cold feet about suing the brother and withdraw the case anyway).

I busied myself tracing debtors and carrying out moral health checks on prospective bridegrooms for cautious families (a good double bind, because I could sneakily ask the bridegrooms if they wanted to pay for financial profiles of the families). For several days I was a dedicated private informer. When that palled I retrieved the big toe from an empty vase on a high shelf out of Nux's reach, and went down to the Forum to see if I could irritate Anacrites.

He had had so many revolting finds handed in by people who assumed the reward still applied that a separate room and two dedicated scribes had had to be assigned to the enquiry. A quick glance told me most of the horrid deposits should have been rejected, but the officials were receiving and logging everything. Anacrites had progressed only as far as devising a form to be filled in laboriously by his scribes. I tossed in the toe Gaius had found, refused to supply the prescribed half a scroll of details, leered round the door of Anacrites' strictly private office, then disappeared again.

I had had my fun. I could have left it at that. Instead, gnawed at by something Gaius had said and what I had overheard myself at Julia's party, I decided I would go and visit Lollius.

My sister Galla struggled to exist with an uncertain number of children and no support from her husband. She rented a doss down by the Trigeminal Gate. It could have been described as a fine riverbank property with fabulous views and a sun terrace, but not to anyone who had seen it. Here my favourite nephew Larius had grown up, before he had the sense to elope and become a wall painter in the luxurious villas on the Bay of Neapolis. Here in theory lived Gaius, though he rarely put in an appearance, preferring to steal sausages from street sellers and curl up at night in a temple Portico. Here, on extremely infrequent occasions, one could encounter the Tiber water boatman Lollius.