Lindsey Davis - Three Hands in The Fountain

That could be a mistake. The Anio flowed right through their estate. They let me look round. Their grounds were Gill of huts, stables, animal pens, storage barns, and even a gazebo in the form of a mock-temple on the sunny riverbank, in any of which abducted females might be held, tortured, killed and hacked to bits. I was well aware that the Fulvii might look like happy, open-natured souls, yet could well harbour dark jealousies and indulge long-held hates through vicious acts.

I was a Roman. I had a deep-seated suspicion of anyone who chose to live in the countryside.

Moving on down the valley, I reached another private entrance, not far above where water was diverted from the river into the conduit of the Anio Novus. This estate looked subtly different from the flourishing groves of the Fulvii. There were olive trees, though as on so many hillsides these looked as if nobody owned them; it rarely means they are abandoned in fact. The owner here probably turned up to harvest them. Still, the trees had a tangled, unpruned look which would have made my olive-growing friends in Baetica eye them askance. Too much vegetation grew around the trunks. Tame rabbits sat and looked at me instead of scampering for their lives.

I nearly rode on, but duty compelled me to turn off and investigate. I followed an overgrown track, buried in a tangled wood. Before I had gone any distance I met a man. He was standing by a pile of logs at the side of the track, doing nothing in particular. If he had had an axe or any other sharp tool with him I might have felt nervous, but he was just looking as if he hoped nobody would come along and ask him to do any work. Since this was private land I had to stop.

'Hello!'

His answer was a fathomless country stare. He was a slave, probably: tanned and sturdy from outdoor work. Hair unstyled, several teeth missing, coarse skin. Age indeterminate, but fifty maybe. Neither over-tall nor dwarfish. Badly dressed rather than ugly. Wearing a rough brown tunic, belt and boots. Hardly a god, yet no worse than scores of thousands of other lowborns who cluttered up the Empire, reminding the rest of us just how fortunate we were to have schooling, character, and the energy to look out for ourselves.

'I was just riding to the house. Can you tell me who lives here?'

'The old man.' A reluctant country voice came from a wide-cheeked, not-exactly-hostile face. He was answering, though. Since I had not introduced myself, that was more than I would have expected in Rome. He was probably under orders to discourage strangers who might be livestock thieves. I put aside my prejudice.

'You work for him?'

'That's my task in life.' I had met the type before. He blamed the world for all his misfortunes. A slave his age might have expected to gain his freedom one way or another. Maybe he lacked the opportunity to earn his price through fiddling, or to demonstrate the right kind of loyalty. He certainly lacked the cheek and charm of most sophisticated slaves in Rome.

'I need to know if anyone from here ever goes to Rome for the Circus Maximus Games?'

'Not the old man. He's eighty-six!'

We laughed a little. That explained the faint air of neglect on the estate. 'Does he treat you well?'

'Couldn't ask for better.' With the joke, the slave had become more approachable.

'What's his name?'

'Rosius Grams.'

'Does he live here alone?'

'He does.'

'No relatives?'

'Up in Rome.'

'Can I go and see him?' The slave shrugged agreement. I gathered I might not gain much from the experience, but I had been wrong in my judgement earlier; there was no opposition to my request. 'Thanks – and what's your name?'

He gazed at me with the slight trace of arrogance some people show: as if they expect everybody to know who they are. 'Thurius.'

I nodded, and rode on.

Rosius Grams was sitting in a long chair under a portico, lost in dreams of events sixty years ago. It was obvious that this was how he spent hours every day. He was covered with a rug, but I could see a shrunken, hook-shouldered figure, white-haired and watery-eyed. He seemed well cared for and, considering his age, pretty fit. But he was not exactly ready to take seven turns around a running stadium. He certainly was no murderer.

A housekeeper had let me in and left me to talk to him unsupervised. I asked him a few simple questions, which he answered with an air of great courtesy. He looked to me as if he were pretending to be dafter than he was, but most old men enjoy doing that for their private amusement. I was looking forward to doing it myself one day.

I told him, by way of conversation, that I had come here from Tibur.

'Did you see my daughter?'

'I thought your family were in Rome, sir?'

'Oh…' The poor old stick looked confused. 'Yes, that may be so. Yes, yes; I do have a daughter in Rome -'

'When did you last see your daughter, sir?' I deduced he had been abandoned out here for so long he had forgotten what family he had.

'Oh… I saw her not long ago,' he assured me, though somehow it sounded as if it happened a long time back. He was so vague it could just as well have been two days ago. As a witness, the old chap managed to seem wickedly unreliable. His deep-set eyes suggested that he knew it too, and didn't care if he misled me.

'You don't visit Rome a lot, nowadays?'

'Do you know, I'm eighty-six!'

'That's wonderful!' I assured him. He had already told me twice.

He seemed eager for company, though he had little of interest to say to anyone. I managed to extricate myself fairly gently. Something about Rosius Grams suggested he could well be up to mischief, but once I knew he could not be the murderer I needed to be on my way.

I cantered back to the road, this time seeing nobody along the track.

The place where we would be staying lay near the various springs which fed the Aqua Marcia. Bolanus had suggested their underground position would make access for the killer both difficult and unlikely. That was not how the dismembered hands entered the supply.

But Bolanus reckoned he could provide our answer. He and Frontinus were waiting for me as arranged, at the forty-second milestone: beside a large mud reservoir where the Anio Novus began. The valley was full of birdsong. It was a bright country afternoon, in grim contrast to the dark conversations we were about to hold.

A dam with a sluice in the bed of the river helped steer part of the current into this basin. It formed a huge settling tank which filtered out impurities before the start of the aqueduct. Now for the first time in years it had been drained and cleaned out. Banks of dredged-up mud were drying all around it. Slow-moving public slaves were unloading their breakfast from a donkey, leaving their tools in his pack: a typical scene. The donkey turned his head suddenly and grabbed a bit to eat himself; he knew how to get the better of the water board.

'With aqueducts,' Bolanus explained to us, 'it's difficult and unnecessary to design a filtration system along the whole run. We tend to make a big effort at the start, then have extra tanks at the end, just before distribution starts. But that means anything which gets past the first filter can go all the way to Rome.'

'Arriving as little as a day later,' I reminded him, remembering what he had told me in an earlier discussion.

'My star pupil! Anyway, as soon as I came up here I could see we had problems. This basin had never been cleared since Caligula inaugurated the channel. You can imagine what we found in the mud.'

'That was when you uncovered more remains?' Frontinus prompted.

Bolanus looked sick. 'I found a leg.'

'Was that all?' Frontinus and I exchanged a glance. The message that had reached us previously had implied limbs of all sorts and sizes.