Lindsey Davis - Three Hands in The Fountain

Some of my sisters' children spotted the grisly item and crowded round to see it. Petro hastily wrapped up the hand in a piece of rag; I hoped it was not one of our new Spanish dinner napkins. It made an intriguing parcel, which caught the eye of Nux, a determined street mongrel who had adopted me. The dog leapt at the parcel. Everyone snatched to save it. The hand fell out of the rag. It landed on the floor, and was captured by Marius, the extremely serious elder son of my sister Maia who just happened to come into the room at that point. When she saw her normally wholesome eightyear-old sniffing at a badly decayed relic, apparently supervised approvingly by Lucius Petronius, my favourite sister used some language I never thought she knew. Much of it described Petronius, and the rest appertained to me.

Maia made sure she snatched up the flagon of fine olive oil which was her present from me from Baetica and then she, Famia, Marius, Ancus, Cloelia and little Rhea all went home.

Well, that cleared some space.

While everyone else was sniggering and looking shifty, Petro threw a heavy arm round my shoulders and greeted my mother with affection. 'Junilla Tacita! How right you are about Falco needing to buckle down. As a matter of fact, he and I have just been outside having a long discussion about that. You know, he seems feckless, but he does recognise his position. He needs to establish his office, take on some lucrative cases and build up a reputation so the work continues to flow in.' That sounded good. I wondered why I had never thought of it. Petronius had not finished his oration. 'We found the ideal solution. While I'm taking a break from the vigiles I'm going to move into his old apartment – and give him a hand as a partner myself.'

I beamed at Anacrites in a charitable way. 'You're just a fraction too late for the festival. Afraid the job is taken, old fellow. Bad luck!'

When we slapped the parcel on to the clerk's table, Fusculus reached for it eagerly. He had always had a hearty appetite and thought we had brought him in a snack. We let him open it.

For a second he did think it was an interesting new kind of cold sausage, then he recoiled with a yell.

'Urgh! Where have you two infantile beggars been playing? Who does this belong to?'

'Who knows?' Petronius had had time to get used to the dismembered hand. While jolly Fusculus still looked pale, Petro could appear blase. 'No seal ring with a lover's name, no handy Celtic woad tattoo – it's so swollen and misshapen you can't even tell whether it came from a woman or a man.'

'Woman,' guessed Fusculus. He prided himself on his professional expertise. The hand, which had four fingers missing, was so badly swollen from being in water that there were no real grounds for his guess.

'How's work?' Petronius asked him yearningly. I could tell that as a partner in my own business his commitment would be meagre.

'It was all right until you two came in.'

We were at the Fourth Cohort's guard house. Most of it was storage for fire-fighting equipment, reflecting the vigiles' main task. Ropes, ladders, buckets, huge grass mats, mattocks and axes, and the pumping engine, were all ready for action.- There was a small bare cell into which cat burglars and arsonists could be flung, and a utilitarian room where those on duty could either play dice or beat all Hades out of the burglars and fire-raisers if that seemed more fun. Both rooms were normally empty at this hour. The holding cell was used at night; in the morning its miserable contents were either released with a caution or marched off to the tribune's office for a formal interrogation. Since most offences occur under cover of darkness only a skeleton staff was on duty by day. They were out searching for suspects – or sitting on a bench in the sun.

Do not be fooled. The vigiles' life was harsh and dangerous. Most of them had been public slaves. They had signed up because eventually, if they survived, they earned honourable discharge as citizens. Their official term of duty was just six years. Soldiers in the legions serve at least twenty. There was a good reason for the short enlistment, and not many vigiles lasted the full term.

Tiberius Fusculus, the best of Petro's hand-picked officers and now standing in for his chief, gazed at us warily. He was a round, cheerful fellow, thin on top, extremely healthy, and sharp as a tenting needle. He was keenly interested in the theory of crime, but we could tell by the way he poked the swollen hand away from him he did not intend to pursue this if he could file it in the 'No Action' pigeonhole.

'So what do you want me to do with it?'

'Find the rest?' I suggested. Fusculus scoffed.

Petronius surveyed the object. 'It has obviously been in the water a long time.' His tone was apologetic. 'We've been told it was found blocking a pipe in a castellum on the Aqua Appia, but it could have got there from somewhere else.'

'Most people are cremated,' Fusculus said. 'You might get some dog digging up a human hand at the crossroads in a village in the provinces, but bodies don't get buried raw in Rome.'

'It smacks of dirty business,' Petro agreed. 'If someone, possibly a woman, has been done in, why hasn't there been an outcry?'

'Probably because women are always being done in,' Fusculus explained helpfully. 'It's their husbands or lovers who do it, and when they wake up sober the men either collapse in remorse and come straight here to confess, or else they find the peace and quiet so welcome that raising an outcry is the last thing they consider.'

'All women have nosy friends,' Petro pointed out. 'A lot have interfering mothers; some are caring for aged aunts who if left on their own would wander out into the highway and frighten the donkeys. And what about the neighbours?'

'The neighbours report it,' said Fusculus. 'So we go to the house and ask the husband; he tells us that the neighbours are poisonous bastards making malicious accusations, then he claims his wife has gone to visit relatives at Antium. We say, when she comes home will he ask her to drop in and confirm it; we file the details; she never comes, but we never have time to pursue it because by then twenty other things are happening. Anyway, the husband will have run off.' He did not add 'and good luck to him', but his tone was eloquent.

'Don't give me the brush-off; I'm not some member of the Public.' Petronius was discovering how the public felt when they ventured to his office. He sounded annoyed, probably at himself for not having been prepared for it.

Fusculus was faultlessly polite. He had been putting off the public for the past fifteen years. 'If there has been a crime it could have happened anywhere, sir, and the chances of us picking up the rest of the body are nil.'

'You're not keen on this,' I divined.

'Clever man.'

'The evidence turned up on the Aventine.'

'A lot of filth turns up on the Aventine,' snorted Fusculus sourly, almost as if he included us in that category. 'This isn't evidence, Falco. Evidence is a material object that casts useful light on a known incident, enabling a prosecution. We have no idea where this forlorn fist came from, and I bet we never will. If you ask me,' he went on, evidently thinking he had found an inspired solution, 'it must have been polluting the water supply, so tracing any other body parts is a problem for the water board. I'll report the find. It's up to the Curator of Aqueducts to take action.'

'Don't be stupid,' scoffed Petro. 'When did anyone in the water board ever show any initiative? They're all too busy working fiddles.'

'I'll threaten to expose a few. Any sign of you coming back to work, chief?'

'Ask Rubella,' growled Petro, though I knew the tribune had said my foolish pal was to ditch the gangster's daughter before showing his face around the cohort again. Unless I had missed something, that still left Petro with a goodbye speech to make to Milvia.