David Wishart: White Murder

He smiled. ‘That should be ample. My thanks to you. Natalis, my apologies.’ He turned to Cario. ‘Cario -’

He didn’t finish the sentence, just stopped after the name. As he walked away towards the house itself Laughing George uncrossed his arms and half-rose. I waved him down, and for a wonder he nodded.

I expected Eutacticus to come out, but he didn’t; we found later that, in the event, he’d gone. Maybe Cammius had had a word with him on his way upstairs. For half an hour we sat. We didn’t talk, we just sat. Then we went up to the study.

Cammius was lying on the reading couch. It wasn’t a pretty death: he must’ve taken the stuff that he would’ve used on Polydoxus if Acceptus hadn’t done the job for him, and it obviously worked as well on people as it would on horses. He’d laid a cloak on the back of a chair, probably on purpose: the guy was neat and businesslike to the end. I draped it over the body, covering the face, and left him to his son and his slaves. I didn’t speak to Natalis, or to Acceptus. Typhon was gone, too, and Laughing George was just a memory. They may have left separately or together, I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know, either.

I went home.

I called in at Renatius’s on the way to the Caelian to tell the guy the news. Also to get quietly smashed, because although Cammius’s death hadn’t been any of my doing – quite the reverse – it had still left me depressed as hell. Charax and his pals, I noticed, had finished renovating the tenement opposite. Or at least the scaffolding and other signs of building work had gone. The place still looked pretty scruffy, though, and I wondered if the old pennypincher who owned it had finally realised what a pack of skivers he’d landed himself with and cancelled out on the contract.

Whatever the reason, Charax and Co. were in residence at their usual table. The god of building sites and odd-job plasterers knew where they got the money from, but it must’ve been in some sort of regular supply because even the placid Renatius wouldn’t’ve put up with his wineshop being used as a headquarters by the trade’s biggest cowboys rent-free, and whatever shining points of character were writ large on Charax’s roll of fate pleasantness of personality weren’t exactly prominent.

They gave me the big wave. ‘Afternoon, consul,’ Charax said. ‘Haven’t seen you around for a while. How’s it going?’

‘Okay.’ I moved over to the counter where Renatius himself was tucking into a plate of sausage and a cup of wine. ‘Jug of Spoletian, Renatius. A full one.’

He raised his eyebrows, got up and reached for the jug shelf without a word. I pulled up a stool and sat down. ‘You finished with the tenement, Charax?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ Charax said. One of the acolytes sniggered. ‘The job sort of came to a natural halt.’

‘Yeah? Old what’s-his-name – Atellius, wasn’t it? – given you the boot?’

‘Nah. He’s dead. Had a bit of an accident.’

Renatius was decanting the wine. ‘Fell through the floorboards on the second floor while he was inspecting the building and broke his neck,’ he said neutrally.

‘Well, we hadn’t started up there, had we?’ Charax lifted his winecup and sipped. ‘The floor was riddled with dry rot. Silly bugger went up without telling us. If he’d said where he was going we’d’ve warned him.’

‘You weren’t around to ask,’ Renatius grunted. ‘You were all in here.’

‘Yeah, true, but we couldn’t be on the job all the time, could we? ‘S not reasonable to expect that.’

I sighed and poured myself a cup.

‘So the old guy’s heir dispensed with their services.’ Renatius went back to his sausage. ‘They were lucky not to be prosecuted.’

‘Oh, I reckon the heir thought we’d done him a favour.’ Charax beamed. ‘Atellius might’ve been in his seventies but he was a wiry old stick. Could’ve gone on for years.’

‘Didn’t get the chance, did he?’ Renatius turned to me. ‘So. How’s the Pegasus business doing?’

‘It’s over.’ I drank. ‘The murderer was the Whites’ boss Cammius. He killed himself a couple of hours ago.’

That got a respectful silence, even from Charax: faction leaders are big figures in Rome, even the two minor ones. Consuls, city judges and the like don’t even come close.

‘You want to tell us the details?’ Renatius said eventually.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I think maybe I’ll keep these private.’ The guy had a right to know who’d knifed his customer, but the ins and outs of the Polydoxus scam were another matter. That was between Natalis and Cario; how they would settle it I didn’t know and I didn’t much care, but it wasn’t for wineshop consumption. ‘You ever notice something interesting, Renatius? Villains – real villains – never seem to get really hurt. It’s the half-villains that end up nailed, or nailing themselves.’ I took a long swallow of wine. ‘Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’

‘ “Justice with her even steps has passed from out the world”,’ Charax said.

I turned, frowning. ‘What?’

‘It’s poetry, consul. Means the lady with the scales isn’t here any more. She’s long gone.’ He raised his cup to his lips. ‘Well-known mythological fact, is that.’

‘Yeah. Right.’ Jupiter! I turned back to Renatius. ‘He wasn’t a bad man, Cammius, not compared with some of the other bastards in the case, like your Watch pals Valgius and his sidekick Delicatus’ – let alone Pegasus himself, only I couldn’t say that – ‘yet he’s the one who ends up chopped.’

Renatius shrugged. ‘You said it yourself, Corvinus. He was a murderer. He deserved all he got.’

I grunted and topped up my cup. Sure, that was a fair way of looking at it, especially if you didn’t know the background, but I had the nagging suspicion that Cammius would’ve finished by killing himself anyway, even if I hadn’t interfered. That was the point; he’d judged himself, and no mistake, without my help, and when I’d covered the guy’s face with his cloak I’d felt just a little bit guilty on my own account. Maybe our homespun plasterer-poet was right: there wasn’t any justice any more, she was long gone. Look at Eutacticus; that bastard must’ve been responsible for dozens of deaths. And Acceptus. He’d pay in some way, I was sure, but I was willing to bet the price would be no more than he could afford.

The trouble with rooting around in dirty linen is that whether you like it or not your hands pick up the smell.

‘ Panta rhei , consul.’ That was Charax again. ‘Everything flows. The old giveth place to the new. Bit like plaster, really.’

Oh, shit. I had to grin, though. I turned round again, holding my winecup. ‘Is that so, now, pal?’ I said.

‘Sure. Take Atellius. Arriving on site while we were having lunch, going upstairs and falling through the sodding floor was what you might call a fortuitous concatenation of circumstances. For the heir, anyway. The old bugger might’ve been close enough to skin a flint but he was a cheery soul and I’d nothing against him personal. It was a complete accident, right? Nothing anyone could do about it.’ He beamed. ‘We may not have justice any longer, consul, but we’ve still got luck. Me, I’m one for the vagaries of fate, myself. The cosmic googlies. Like that millionaire up your way who’s hitching up with his housekeeper, for instance.’

‘Yeah?’ I set the winecup down. ‘Who’s that, now?’

‘Guy called Petillius. Owns half the mantle-dyeing businesses in Rome.’

I stared at him. ‘What?’

‘Truth. You hadn’t heard? The story was all round the city this morning.’