Lindsey Davis - The Silver Pigs

"She cannot have realized," Petro murmured. He cleared his throat. "That was all. No nasty work."

Rape. He meant rape, torture, indignity, indecency.

She was dead and this poor fool was trying to tell me she had not been terrorized! I wanted to rage at him that nothing else mattered. He was trying to tell me it was quick. I could see that! One short, hard, violent upward blow had killed Sosia Camillina before she guessed what the man would do. There was very little blood; she had died of shock.

"Was she dead when you arrived?" I asked "Did she say anything?"

Routine questions, Marcus. Cling to your routine.

Pointless even to ask. Petronius shrugged helplessly, then moved away.

So I stood there, and was as nearly alone with Sosia as I would ever be again. I wanted to hold her in my arms, but there were too many people. After a while I just dropped down on my heels and stayed with her while Petro kept his squad dies at rest. I could not speak to her, not even in my head. I no longer really looked at her, lest the sluggish wake of her spilt blood should defeat me.

I sat there, living through what must have happened. It was the nearest I could come to helping her. It was the only way I could comfort her for dying so alone.

I know who it was. He must realize that. One day, however carefully he protects himself, the man will answer to me.

She found him there, writing (that was evident). Writing what? Not a tally of the silver bars, for she was wrong, there were no bars, though we turned the deserted warehouse over for days. But he was writing, because lampblack from the wet ink stained her white dress around the wound. Perhaps she knew him. When she found him, he realized she needed to be silenced, so he stood up and rapidly stabbed her, a rising blow through the heart, once, with his pen.

Petronius was right. Sosia Camillina could not have expected that.

I rose. I managed neither to stumble nor break down.

"Her father…"

"I'll tell them," stated Petronius drably. A task he so hated. "Go home. I'll tell the family. Marcus, just go home!"

I decided after all to let him tell them.

I could feel his eyes watching me as I walked away. He wanted to help. He knew there was nothing anyone could do.

I went to the funeral. In my line of work, this is traditional. Petronius came with me.

According to custom, they conducted the ceremony out of doors. They came in procession from her father's house, bringing Sosia Camillina in an open bier with garlands in her hair. The cremation took place outside the city near the family mausoleum on the Appian Way. They dispensed with professional mourners. Young men who were friends of the family carried her funeral bed.

There was a blustery wind. They brought her through Rome in daylight, with flute music and lamentation, disrupting the city streets. At the pyre, built of untrimmed wood like an altar and with dark leaves woven round the sides, one of the young bearers stumbled. I stepped forward to help, without looking. The bier was so light it nearly flew from our hands as we swung it up.

Her father's oration was short, almost perfunctory. That seemed right. So too had been her life. What Publius Camillus said that day was simple, and simply the truth.

"This was my only daughter, Sosia Camillina. She was fair, reverent and dutiful, snatched from the world before she could know the love of a husband or child. Receive her young soul gently, O ye gods…" He seized one of the torches and, with formally averted gaze, he lit the pyre.

"Sosia Camillina, Hail and Farewell!"

Surrounded by flowers, small trinkets, sweet oils, she left us. People wept. I was one of them. Scented flames crackled up. I glimpsed her once through the smoke. She was gone.

Petronius and I had endured the respectful ritual scores of times. We never liked it. I raged under my breath, as we stood to one side. "This is obscene. Remind me again what in Hades I'm doing here!"

He answered in his low voice, lecturing me to steady me, "Official sympathy- Plus a forlorn hope that the maniac we are looking for may turn up too. Fascinated by his crime, flaunting his mad mask at the mausoleum…"

Keeping on my funeral face, I scoffed, "Exposing himself to curious scrutiny in the one place where he knows uncomfortable law agents are standing about, just longing for a chance to gallop after any uninvited guest who has a funny look about the eyes"

Petro dropped a hand on my arm. Then again, you know, we may spot a mood in the family that doesn't fit."

"We can rule out the family," I declared.

Petronius raised an eyebrow. He had left this delicate issue to the praetor let a magistrate of their own rank plant his nice clean shoe in the manure. I think he assumed I was too brokenhearted to consider it. But I had.

"Women not strong enough, children not tall enough. Decimus Verus has fifty members of the government whose word I don't rate a bean and the old slave from the Black Sea who cleans his boots who is good enough for me to swear he was at the senate, while Publius Meto was discussing merchant ships with his brother's daughter's divorced husband which incidentally, Petro, has ruled out the ex-husband too, before we even bothered to rule him in." I had checked. I knew the whereabouts of relations the senator and his brother had forgotten they ever owned.

The only thing I had not done was to meet Helena Justina's ex-husband. Never even troubled to ask his name. I excused him for two reasons. The useful Black Sea boot-slave had told me where he was. And anyway, Helena's husband had got himself divorced. I had seen enough of other people's marriages to believe that the parties concerned were usually best off when they put an end to their formal union. If Helena's husband agreed with me, he was obviously a reasonable sort of man.

Do not imagine my stalwart old tent mate stayed idle. Petronius had planted himself on the local praetor's staff. He made himself indispensable to the aedile on the case (happily not Pertinax here: we were in Sector Eight, the Roman Forum District now). Petro himself led a search through every store and hovel in Nap Eane. It turned out the warehouse where Sosia was found belonged to an ancient ex-consul called Caprenius Marcellus, who was dying of some slow malady on a country estate fifty miles south of Rome. The praetor would have accepted that dying was an alibi, but Petronius still travelled the distance and back to make sure. It could not be Caprenius Marcellus. He was in too much pain even to see Petro standing beside his bed.

The warehouse was empty when we found it, but we were certain it had been used. There were recent waggon ruts in the yard. Anyone who knew the owner was ill could have secretly moved in. Yet apparently they moved out afterwards.

There were no incidents at the funeral. We recognized no villains. Petronius and I were the people who felt out of place.

By now the close family were waiting to gather the ashes; it was time for other mourners to depart. Before we left, I forced myself to approach Sosia Camillina's bereaved papa.

"Publius Camillus Meto."

It was the first time I had seen him since that day with Pertinax. He was a man you forget: the smooth oval face that carried so little expression, the remote gaze with a hint of justified contempt. This was almost the only occasion, too, when I saw him with his brother. Publius seemed older with that bald head, but today it was covered while he officiated here and, as he turned to avoid me, I noticed a handsome, decisive cast to his profile which my man Decimus lacked. When he moved off he left a faint haze of myrrh, and he wore a gold intaglio ring with a substantial emerald, slight touches of bachelor vanity which I had missed before. Noticing these things, which were so unimportant, added to my awkwardness.