Lindsey Davis - Three Hands in The Fountain

Given what I had heard about such men, I also thought privately: the corpse is only a week old yet. He has cut off one hand, but he could still be snuggling up to the rest of her in some lair.. . No. September was a very hot month.

Frontinus was grumbling at us. 'I cannot have my enquiry put into limbo until the start of the next Games. If we do that, we lose impetus and the whole thing stagnates. I have seen it happen too often. Besides, what would it entail? That we allow the man an opportunity to kill some other girl during the Augustales opening ceremony?'

'Too great a risk,' Petro agreed. We might have no choice.

'That's the worst scenario,' I suggested, rousing myself to take part. 'But we don't plan to sit on goosedown cushions until October, just because our quarry might have left Rome.'

'If he has, you ought to go after him,' said Frontinus.

'Oh, we would, sir, but we don't know where to look. Now is the time to follow leads – and we do have some.'

'Can we go through them?' The Consul's manner as always was brisk. He managed not to suggest he was calling us incompetent, although his presumption that professionals would be eager to supply exactly what he wanted did impose a strain. We would need to be sharp with this one. His standards were sky high.

To start, I plied him with Helena Justina's summary of what we knew about the killer's personality. He looked pleased. This was well thought out. He liked its clarity and sense. Petronius assumed I was extemporising; he let me know by a frozen expression that he preferred not to have an imaginative orator for a partner. Still, he too recognised good stuff. He was only annoyed he had not thought of it first.

Petro then did some fly work of his own. 'We know, sir, that Asinia disappeared somewhere between the apsidal end of the Circus Maximus, where she was last seen, and her home. She had set off heading north. She may have been abducted in the Press around the Circus, or later when she reached quieter streets. It depends whether this man works by tricking his victims, or if he just jumps on them. Falco and I will continue our nightly surveillance. Solid routine may throw up something.'

'Solid routine,' repeated Frontinus.

'Exactly,' said Petronius in a firm voice. 'What I want to pursue as well is whether any of the commercial chair and litter hire men saw anything on opening night.'

'You think it's one of the commercial transporters doing this?' We could see Frontinus immediately deciding to hammer the aedile who had responsibility for managing the streets.

'It's an ideal cover.' Petro clearly had a ruse. Trust the vigiles; they have to invent a single hypothesis then prove it, whereas informers can cope with several ideas at once. When real life throws up something that departs from the vigiles' scenario, they come unstuck. Being Petro, however, his theory did sound apt. 'The chairmen can pick up the women without looking at all suspicious – and afterwards they have the means of conveying the corpses about.'

'They tend to work in pairs, though,' I demurred.

Petro went on levelly, 'Maybe we'll find in the end that a couple of them work as a pair for more than carrying. Julius Frontinus, I'll be making my own enquiries, but there are plenty of these characters. It would help, sir, if you could ask the Prefect of Vigiles to order an official survey.'

'Certainly.' Frontinus made a swift note on a waxed tablet.

'He needs to get the Fifth and the Sixth Cohorts on to it so we can cover both ends of the Circus. The killer may stick to a favourite route, but we cannot rely on that. The vigiles should also make enquiries among the night moths.'

'Who?'

'The Prostitutes.'

'Ah!'

'If this man approaches women regularly, one of themoths who flit around near the Circus must have encountered him.'

'Yes, of course.'

'He may in fact hate the professionals; he may prefer respectable women because they are cleaner, or less adept at escaping from trouble. Who knows? But if he hangs about a lot, then the night girls may know he exists.'

It was my turn to make suggestions. Like Petro I adopted a pious manner. 'I want to look further into the water systems, sir. The engineer's assistant who came here, Bolanus, had some good ideas. He's willing to examine the aqueducts out in the country too, just in case our man's not a city boy. That's another reason we aren't rushing outside Rome ourselves; Bolanus may turn up something specific.'

'Pursue it with him,' Frontinus commanded. 'I will give instructions to the Curator that Bolanus is to assist as we require.'

'What about the magnificent Statius?' Petro enquired wickedly.

Frontinus looked over the rim of his note-tablet. 'Suppose I say we have asked for Bolanus so as not to remove his superior from his more vital managerial work. What else?'

'Make contact with the Prefect of Vigiles -'

He nodded, though he looked as if he realised we were giving him the boring jobs while we escaped on our own. Still, we were confident the two contacts would be made. He would do it this very morning, then he would keep chasing the Curator and the Prefect for results. He had not minded us telling him his duties either; he accepted as much chivying himself as he handed out to us. For a man of his rank that was rare.

We had hoped the enquiry was just taking off. The new evidence connected with Asinia seemed to give us a boost. It was temporary, though. We left the conference with Frontinus already aware we were bluffing, and as the next few days passed depression overtook both of us.

Petronius wore himself out interviewing chairmen, which was dreary enough, and trying to interview streetwalkers, which was positively dangerous. He learned precious little from any of them. Meanwhile I eventually managed to make contact with Bolanus, who seemed to be always out on site now. When I did catch him, he appeared curiously deflated. He said he had been conducting searches of the castelli and other parts of the aqueducts out across the Campagna; as yet he had found nothing. I feared he might have been warned to be obstructive. Ready to bring in the full might of the Consul to lean on his superiors, I asked him straight, but Bolanus denied it. I had to leave him to it.

We had hit a low point. It was one both Petro and I recognised. Unless we had some luck, this was as far as we would ever go. The Ludi Romani were trundling through their final days. The damned Greens were going to come out ahead of the Blues overall in the chariot racing. Several prized gladiators had suffered unexpected defeats and gone to Hades, breaking women's hearts and bankrupting their trainers. The dramatic performances were dire as usual. As usual nobody but me dared say so.

And the case was slipping away from us.

We were not going to complete the enquiry by the end of the Ludi Romani.

I expected that Julius Frontinus would pay us off. Instead, he accepted that without further clues we were stuck. He cut our retainer. He gave us stern talks. Without a solution to offer the Emperor, he was deprived of glory too, so he must have felt he needed us.

Our only advance was that Petro's enquiries drew out a few names of women who had gone missing in the past. Most had been prostitutes. Others in the same profession named them to us, and when we berated them for not reporting the disappearances to the vigiles, half the time they insisted that it had been done. (Sometimes there were children to care for; sometimes the women's pimps had noticed they had lost part of their livelihood.) Nobody had ever made a connection between the incidents; nobody had bothered much at all, frankly. It was difficult to put together a reliably complete file on the old cases, but Petro and I both felt there had been increasing numbers recently.