Lindsey Davis - Three Hands in The Fountain

I made no plans to alter my social life. 'Have you fished any out?'

'No, but I know someone who did.' Again.

'You saw it yourself?'

'Right.' Remembering, even he went quiet.

'How many are we talking about?'

'Well, not so many,' Lollius conceded. 'Just enough for us to think 'He's still at it!" when one floats to the top or gets tangled in an oar. They all look pretty much the same,' he explained, as if I was too dumb to work out how the boatmen made the connection.

'With the same mutilations? You talk as if pulling these beauties out of the river is a traditional perk of your job. How long has it been going on?'

'Oh, years!' He sounded quite definite.

'Years? How many years?'

'As long as I've been a waterman. Well, most of the time anyway.' I should have known better than to hope Lollius would be definite, even about something as sensational as this.

'So we're looking for a mature murderer?'

'Or an inherited family business,' Lollius cackled.

'When was the last one discovered?'

'The last I heard about' – Lollius paused, letting me absorb the implication that he was at the centre of life on the river so bound to know everything important – 'would have been about last April. Sometimes we find them in July, though, and sometimes in the autumn.'

'And what did you call them?'

'Festival fancies.' Still proud of the definition, he didn't mind repeating it once more. 'Like those special Cretan cakes, you know -'

'Yes, yes, I get it. They turn up at public holidays.' 'Neat, eh? Somebody must have spotted that it's always when there's a big set of Games, or a Triumph.'

'The calendar's so crammed with public holidays I'm surprised anyone noticed.'

'The joke is, it's always when we roll back to work with a really vile headache and can't face anything too raw.' That happened frequently too; the water boatmen all had a notorious capacity for drink.

'When they get fished out, what do you do with the bodies?'

Lollius glared at me. 'What do you think we do? We shove in a spike to let the gas out, tow them downstream out of trouble, then sink them if we can.'

'Oh, the humane touch.'

His scorn was justifiable. 'We're certainly not daft enough to hand them in to the authorities!'

'Fair enough.' Public spirit is at best a waste of time, at worst positively asking for ten months rotting in the Lautumiae jail without a trial.

'So what are you suggesting?' Lollius jibed. 'That we should dig a dirty great hole in a public garden and bury the lumps when nobody's looking – or when we hope they're not? Or we could all club together and arrange something through our guild's funeral club, maybe? Oh, yes. You try arranging a polite cremation for someone you don't know who has had all their extremities hacked off by a pervert. Anyway, Falco, if I had found one of the fancies, and even if I was prepared to do something about it, can you imagine how I'd explain it to Galla?'

I smiled drily. 'I expect you'd tell my wonderful trusting big sister some complicated lies, Lollius – just as you normally do!'

Petronius was furious. When he returned from his trip out of town, the tale I reported from Lollius brought out his worst side as a member of the vigiles. He wanted to storm down to the Tiber and arrest anyone who carried an oar.

'Back off, Petro. We don't know any names, and we won't be told any either. I poked around a bit but the boatmen have clammed up. They don't want trouble. Who can blame them? Anyway, without an actual torso what can you do? We now know that the rivermen find these things; it's no real surprise, because if there are dismembered hands floating about then the other body parts had to be somewhere. I let it be known along the embankments that next time we'll take delivery of what they trawl up. Let's not annoy the bastards. Lollius only coughed to me because he was yearning to play the big prawn.'

'He's a rotten old bloater.'

'Don't tell me.'

'I'm sick of messing about, Falco.' Petronius seemed tetchy. Maybe when I sent him to Lavinium I had made him miss an assignation with Milvia. 'The way you do things is incredible. You tiptoe all around the facts, sidling up to suspects with a silly smile on your face, when what's needed is to hand out a few beltings with a cudgel -'

'That's the vigiles' trick for encouraging public trust, eh?' 'It's how to run a systematic enquiry.'

'I prefer to woo the truth out of them.'

'Don't fib. You just bribe them.'

'Wrong. I'm too short of cash.'

'So what's your method, Falco?'

'Subtlety.'

'Bulls' bollocks! It's time we had some routine around here,' Petro declared.

To impose this fine concept, he rushed off, despite the hot weather, and took himself to the river where he would try working on the boatmen although I had told him not to. I knew he would get nowhere. Clearly the harsh lessons I had absorbed in seven years as an informer would have to be learned all over again by him before Lucius Petronius carried weight as my partner. He was used to relying on simple authority to generate something even simpler: fear. Now he would find he lacked that. All he would inspire in the private sector was scorn and contempt. Anyway, for private citizens putting the boot in was not a legal option. (It was probably illegal for the vigiles too, but that was a theory nobody would ever test.)

While Petro was exhausting himself among the water bugs, I applied myself to earning some petty cash. First I cheered myself up extracting payment for various jobs I had done months ago, before Petro joined up with me; the denarii went straight into my bankbox in the Forum, minus the price of a couple of shark steaks for Helena and me.

Then, thanks to our recent notoriety, we had a few tasty tasks. A landlord wanted us to investigate one of his female tenants who had been claiming hard luck; he suspected she was harbouring a live-in boyfriend who should be coughing up a share of the rent. A glance at the lady had already revealed that this was likely; she was a peach and in my carefree youth I would have strung out the job for weeks. The landlord himself had tried unsuccessfully to waylay the boyfriend; my method only took an hour of surveillance. I settled in at midday. As I expected, promptly at lunchtime a runt in a patched tunic turned up looking furtive. He couldn't bear to miss his snack. A word with the tenement's water-carrier confirmed that he lived there; I marched in, confronted the culprits as they shared their eggs and olives, and clinched the case.

A well-to-do papyrus-seller thought his wife was two-timing him with his best friend. We had been watching the set-up; I decided the friend was innocent, though the dame was almost certainly being screwed on a regular basis by the family steward. The client was overjoyed when I cleared his friend, didn't want to hear about the cheating slave, and paid up on the spot. That went in the honesty dish Petro and I were sharing, even the large gratuity.

On the way back to Fountain Court I dropped in at the baths, scraped myself down, listened to some unimportant gossip, and bantered with Glaucus. He was working with another client and I didn't stay. Back at base Petronius Longus had failed to reappear. I was in for a hard time worrying over his whereabouts; it was like being in charge of a lovelorn adolescent. I hoped his absence meant he had gone to attempt a reconciliation with his wife. I knew it was more likely the dog had sneaked off to see Balbina Milvia.

Pleased with my own efforts I shut up the office, exchanged a few words with Lenia, then strolled across the street. I was the cook here, so long as we lacked a troop of whining slaves. Helena had been marinading the fish steaks in olive oil with a few herbs. I panfried them simply over the embers in our cooking bench and we ate them on a green salad dressed with vinegar, more oil and a dash of fish sauce. We had plenty of oil and sauce after our Spanish adventure, though I applied them sparingly. A good shark steak should stand alone.