David Wishart: White Murder

Tone like he was speaking to an idiot, which in the race-mad kid’s eyes I suppose I was. Yeah, well, I’d got that one right, at any rate. The guy was a driver; or not just a driver but one of the drivers, currently. Even I knew Pegasus: half the plaster statuettes on sale outside the Circus had his name on them. Not that that would’ve been any help with the face, mind, because they all came out of the same mould, whoever they were supposed to be, and the names were written on later; but the name itself, that was a different thing altogether. ‘The Greens’ lead?’

‘Not any more, sir. He’s driving for the Whites now. Or at least he will be when the new season starts.’

‘Is that right?’ I sat back while the kid mopped the table. Now that was something you didn’t hear of every day, a Green high-flyer transferring to the Whites. Blues I could’ve understood, because as far as professional street cred’s concerned the Blues and the Greens are pretty well on a par. Whites and Reds are definitely the poor relations. Sure, transfers among the factions go on all the time, and it’s common enough for a second-rater on the Blue or Green team to make the switch to White or Red just so’s his name comes higher on the programme, but for one of their top-notch drivers to do the same is like a Praetorian moving to the Watch. Worse, the guy hadn’t just moved down a peg, he’d changed camps as well: on the track the Whites run point for the Blues just as the Reds do for the Greens. Still, I was no racing buff. No doubt it made sense somewhere along the line. I went back to my wine and cheese.

I wasn’t the only silent drinker now. For the next ten minutes the whole room held its communal breath and kept one eye on the door, waiting for the guy to reappear. He didn’t. Finally Charax cleared his throat. ‘Maybe he’s missed the wall at that,’ he said.

His mates chuckled. Renatius was rinsing cups at the sink. He didn’t turn round. ‘Come off it, Charax,’ he grunted. ‘Joke’s over.’

‘You want me to check on him, Dad?’ Lucius was hopping with excitement. ‘Just to see if he’s all right?’

Renatius shrugged and reached for a towel. Lucius dashed off. We waited.

The kid hadn’t been gone two minutes when he was back. He didn’t come in, though.

‘Uh…dad?’ He was chalk-white. The hairs rose at the nape of my neck.

‘Yeah?’ Renatius said over his shoulder. ‘Close that door, boy, there’s a draught.’

‘Dad, I think he’s dead.’

It took a moment to register. Then Renatius dropped the towel and was through the door in five seconds flat; and the rest of the wineshop, including me, were about two seconds behind him.

Dead was right.

The guy was slumped face-forward against the end wall of the alleyway. On the back of his tunic, just level with the heart, was a broad red stain.

There was one of these horrible pauses while we all tried to persuade ourselves that we weren’t seeing what we were seeing. Renatius shook his head.

‘Oh, shit,’ he murmured. ‘Oh, holy Jupiter.’

The other punters crowding the narrow alley said nothing. Even Charax had shut up.

Bugger. Well, someone had to make a move. ‘Renatius, get everyone back inside, okay?’ I said. ‘Then you stand guard at the mouth of the alley to make sure no one comes barging in. Oh, and send Lucius to the local Watch station.’

‘Waste of time, consul,’ Charax murmured without taking his eyes off the body. ‘The commander’s Titus Valgius. The guy’s a total prat.’

I ignored him. ‘Just do it, Renatius.’

The big man nodded. He was looking grey. ‘Come on, lads,’ he said. ‘Show’s over.’

No one moved; ogle, ogle, ogle. I sighed. Hell: I’d seen this before, and I hated it. Give the great Roman public a corpse or an accident to stare at and they’ll stand there all day. There was only one answer: expensive, sure, but it’d save a lot of hassle in the long run. And where Renatius’s regulars were concerned it’d work every time. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Drinks are on me. At the counter, for the next five minutes only.’

‘You’re a gent, Corvinus.’ Charax beamed. ‘Possessed of true leadership qualities.’

Oh, Jupiter! ‘Just fuck off, Charax, okay?’

‘Certainly, sir. Fucking off at once, sir.’ He did, and the other ghouls followed him.

Which just left me and the corpse.

Okay; so what had we got? I couldn’t in all conscience touch anything, not with Valgius on the way, but if Charax was right in his assessment of the Eighth District Watch commander’s professional capabilities then maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to rely on them. Besides, any clues or ideas I came up with I could pass on to my Watch boss pal Decimus Lippillus over at Public Pond and let him do the tactful thing.

First things first. I knelt down and examined the corpse. Purse all present and correct, buckled to the tunic belt, the drawstrings fastened tight. Not a simple stab-and-grab, then. That had been a possibility, sure, but only an outside one: Iugarius isn’t the Aventine or the Subura, and although the Market Square district has its share of cutpurses and sneak-thieves you don’t get all that many knifemen, at least during the daylight hours. I sniffed: there was a strong smell of urine. Sure, the wall had probably been used for pissing against for generations and that would account for most of it, but I could see that the dead man’s tunic was soaked below the belt. Added to which, from the way he was lying I’d guess that when he’d been stabbed he’d been facing forward no more than a foot from the wall.

In other words, the murderer had got him in mid-flow. I stood up and looked behind me. The alleyway was a dead end, but it was shaped like a Greek gamma or a Latin L turned bottom over top, with the wall at the tip of the shorter bar. That meant two things; first, that he would’ve been hidden from the road, and second that even if he had turned to see who was coming up behind him, which given the alley’s purpose he probably wouldn’t’ve bothered to do, he’d only have had a moment or two after the guy rounded the corner to react. And if he was halfway through a piss with his hands otherwise occupied his reactions would’ve been pretty slow.

Okay; so far so good. What did it all add up to?

The actual course of events was straightforward enough: Pegasus comes out of the wineshop and turns into the alley; whereupon the killer – call him X – gives him time to unlimber then follows him and drives in the knife while his back is turned. We could do better than that, though. First of all, the intact purse, the kink in the alleyway and the short time span involved all taken together meant that an unplanned killing wasn’t likely; and for the last two to fit properly X had to have been keeping a stake-out on the wineshop door. Which meant that he’d either followed the Mystery Boy to Renatius’s in the first place or he knew he’d be in there at that particular time. In either case the poor bastard had been targeted, maybe even set up.

Okay; so who could X have been? For a start, he was pretty cool-headed. Late afternoon, Iugarius may not be heaving but it’s still one of the busiest streets in the city. Our pal X had walked into a dead end alley in broad daylight, killed a man and then walked back out again with a fair percentage of Rome’s honest citizens hurrying past not twenty yards from the scene of crime. And a two-way business it had to be, because unless he was a seven-foot tall athletic ape shinning over the wall at the far end wasn’t an option. Sure, if X didn’t know the topography he might not have realised the alleyway was a dead end, but that just made the killing even more risky: it takes real guts to follow a guy with a drawn knife in your hand when any moment you might meet some innocent punter coming the other way.